


Weeds

by penceyprat



Category: The 1975 (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - 1980s, Alternate Universe - Small Town, Coming of Age, Drugs, F/M, Love/Hate, M/M, Sexuality, Sexuality Issues, Sleeping around, being young and making mistakes, except they don't really hate each other not really, george is this outrageous infamous punk boy who thinks he doesn't have feelings, he does, matty gives him a fucking run for his money, matty is sure of everything except himself but himself is the only thing george knows, matty works in a bookstore and he's a cute lil sweater nerd, they're just both a bit lost really, trying to work out how falling in love works, trying to work out who they are, trying to work things out
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-16
Updated: 2017-01-25
Packaged: 2018-09-09 00:45:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 62,406
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8869231
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/penceyprat/pseuds/penceyprat
Summary: He was a wide eyed, halfway living boy, who looked pretty in the winter light, but was just another dandelion in the spring.
And then he fell in love. He always did.





	1. "i can see it in your eyes, george"

It was simply something to keep him warm on a cold morning. To shine light through the dreary blue grey skies. To force hope through the blanket of ashen nothingness that clung to the town like a thick black fog.

George knew it ought to have meant something more, but it was just  _ enough _ \- more content than contempt. Warm lips, shaky breaths, in the cold. Bodies pressed close together, in more than just an attempt to keep to the shadows of the churchyard.

“You taste like…” He drew away, long arms encircling his shoulders - tight, as if he might never let George go. Despite every ounce of sense in his body, George would have quite liked that. 

The boy looked up at him from behind long, dark eyelashes, tawny brown hair blowing out with the Sunday morning breeze. But he didn’t look  _ beautiful _ . George didn’t go after beautiful boys; they were simply unobtainable. Beautiful boys were strictly heterosexual, and out of his league, and lived in nice big houses, and were nice to their mothers, and knew more than just how to light up a joint. George had left all the beautiful boys behind.

He was, however, decently pretty. And George was content to be resigned to kissing pretty boys in churchyards over an ounce; it was as much to do with keeping him warm in the cold spring weather, as it was with simply making a statement.

“Like… honey…” It took him a moment, but the second half of his sentence did finally come, as he blinked erratically viridescent eyes up towards George: desperate and yearning for more.

George forced himself to subdue a snort; he knew all too well the kind of bullshit half way pretty boys would spew when they had half a mind about getting somewhere. Still, he wasn’t quite clever enough as to not play along. He didn’t care for the reality of the situation, for the meaning behind falsified feelings; he cared instead for something to pass the time, warm hands to hold, a heart to beat against his own.

“You taste like fags.” George didn’t quite have it within him to return the same sappy rhetoric, and instead, crashed their lips back together, pinning bony shoulders back to the church wall.

“Very funny.” He pulled away, leaving George to tug pitifully at his bottom lip: desperate to avoid his gaze, to avoid further conversation. “ _ Come on, George _ .”

“What?” He relented in the end, pulling away to stare great, ashen holes in such a fervent resolve. “Come on, Cam…” He drew out a taunting remark, lighting the most feeble fire in his eyes.

“I don’t care whether you think you’re god himself, I’m not getting off with you behind a  church.” He held his arms firmly across his chest, leaving George to skulk off towards the railing that surrounded the churchyard, running his fingers over the black metal spikes with an undeserved resentment.

George stare down at the ground: grass telling no tales of spring, or at least, the approaching summer, considering the placid half-grey it grew. It was as if it just didn’t quite have the heart to grow - to accept change with maturity and adapt to it, instead of making a pastime out of poorly justified self-destruction. At least, George wasn’t alone in that.

It was all of forty six seconds before Cam followed him. George counted each and every one. 

“It’s not  _ you _ .” He assured him, voice just as dull and ordinary as the world around them. “It’s the church, and the… being in  _ public _ . We can go back to-”

“No.” George told him, turning to press his back against the railings, staring up at Cam, as if  _ daring _ him to kiss him again. The prospect amused George: pushing people to see how far they might go.

It was no less than ten seconds before they kissed once more. George almost laughed, but settled for smiling up against his lips instead. As Cam smiled back, George let him think that it was for the same reason, that they were on the same page, that this was  _ something _ , and not just anything, not just a way to spend a morning or an afternoon.. It was all too easy.

Within seconds, George grew comfortable with their situation, Cam easing under his grasp, and George began to contemplate what might be the likelihood of convincing Cam to give him a handjob behind a church. However, the world was quite to shatter such a resolve, as the still of their surroundings burst into life with chatter and the opening of the church doors as half the town spilled out.

Cam practically leapt against George’s chest as he pulled them back under the guise of the shadows. His face turned as white as winter snow - perfect from a movie scene, the blood in his body falling right to his feet. And yet, George couldn’t subdue his laughter - cackling like he really did own the world and everything in it.

“ _ Come on, Cam _ .” George mimicked his earlier tone, taking a moment to calm his own laughter, before climbing over the railing with ease.

“ _ George _ -” Cam remained still: very little more than speechless.

George outstretched his hand. “ _ Come on _ .” 

He was more insistent than teasing this time around; it bore evidence to the fact that the only real reason George had waited for him was because he still had the weed.

As the voices of churchgoers drew nearer, he placed his hand in George’s, and let himself be pulled over the fence, for the two to run hand in hand through the street, laughing themselves stupid.

The elation was hard to comprehend. Perhaps impossible to put into words. The details of it, at least. George was only happy because he was high. It didn’t mean a thing as to whose fingers were intertwined with his own; he felt free and that was enough.

They ran for minutes, until their cheeks flushed a hot pink, and their hair lay messily: dragged out behind them in the wind. Still, despite his dishevelment, George hit Cam with an unfairly confident smile - faking it through and through - before leading him down the alleyway to their right.

“You’re a dickhead.” Cam told him, rather boldly - it ought to be noted, struggling to catch his breath with his head thrown back against the dusty brick wall.

George didn’t even seem to hear him, digging out the bag of weed from the pocket of Cam’s jeans instead. He caught the beginning of another retort: curling out over the tip of his tongue, but the forbidding look in George’s eyes stopped him from quite committing to it.

“Will you get me off here instead?” George curled his lips around a smirk: forever too daring, forever with too much to say for himself, armed only with laughter in defence.

Cam looked across at him like he was mad, like he didn’t know it was just the drugs, yet like he’d known George in any other way.

George didn’t see him through with a response, instead messily rolling himself a joint between shaking fingers, only quite managing to put it to his lips - never mind light it - before Cam was on his knees, even in the dirt, even in the cold breeze.. 

George bit back a smirk; it was all too easy.

He’d never quite imagined that Cam was even into him enough in order to suck him off in a grotty old alleyway, seeing as he’d been particularly dubious pertaining to just giving him a handjob not ten minutes prior. Then again, that had been in a churchyard, and Cam was one of those boys who liked to think that he still had some dignity about him.

“God, I  _ love _ your cock.” Cam forced out a moan. George threw his head back against the wall, just to hide the roll of his eyes; he’d never heard anything quite so forced in his life.

“I’m sure it loves you too.” George bit back, as Cam continued to stare up at him expectantly. He didn’t give him ample opportunity to say much more before pushing himself into his mouth.

George pulled his head up to the sky: fixating on the slither of bleak sunlight stretching down between the rooftops of the buildings above. He mumbled up to the dreary skies, closing his eyes and painting himself a world in which anyone else had their mouth around his cock.

Cam was very situational. George reckoned that was the nicest way to put it. He was a halfway pretty boy in a halfway liveable town; they had halfway tolerable conversations, and shot each other halfway murderous looks, and shared halfway stolen joints, and sometimes George even halfway liked him.

But he wasn’t his boyfriend. There was nothing halfway about that. George didn’t do boyfriends. George didn’t do girlfriends either. He was just prepared to flash a smile at anyone that might be inclined to get down on their knees for him.

In George’s mind, they weren’t in an alleyway. In his deepest, darkest fantasies, he just had an ounce more respect for himself. They were instead in a bedroom: small but spacious, with four walls yellowed with dust and age and tar. As even by his own creation, their situation could only ever be halfway respectable.

And in George’s deepest, darkest fantasies, it certainly wasn’t Cam before him. It was one of these elusive beautiful people that he’d long left behind. George didn’t dream that he could correct it all; he dreamed instead that the world would bend over backwards for him just to ensure he was content. After all, George had never come to his own head in search of sense. He at least knew better than that.

George thought about a beautiful face and came. He thought about something more than a dirty alleyway and a pathetic Sunday morning. He thought about something meaningful. He thought about everything he’d once lost or thrown down into the dirt. And with eyes wrenched open, his head ached with the comedown, with the split second in which he’d quite believed his own illusion.

“Give us a drag.” Cam stumbled to his feet, wrenching the joint from George’s lips. He knew better than to ask him to return the favour.

George didn’t protest otherwise, attempting to make sense of the mess of blinding white light he’d mixed himself up in. He yearned for the bedroom, the one with the yellowed walls - complete with a distinct smell of candle wax. Burned and burned for days. George dreamed of sitting there and simply watching the flames.

He barely had time to shove his cock back into his pants before a shout came down the alleyway.

“ _ Oi! _ You two!”

George laughed, giving himself a moment to watch Cam’s face turn white, before dashing off: disappearing down the other end of the alleyway. It wasn’t until he reached the street that he threw a glance back over his shoulder; it was the very moment he did so that his stomach plummeted down through his chest.

Cam remained still: a frozen silhouette, a perfectly white ghost, paralysed under the eye of the law. George reckoned himself halfway decent, so stopped for a moment, just to ponder the alternate reality in which he had went back for him. In which he’d grabbed Cam by the hand all over again.

But the moment passed. Like all moments do. And George darted off out into the street, stumbling past the shops in search of somewhere somewhat inconspicuous to hide. He wasn’t stupid enough to imagine that he wouldn’t be pursued also; he didn’t imagine that the policeman would be all that content with just a wide eyed, halfway living boy, who looked pretty in the winter light, but was just another dandelion in the spring. But perhaps another would do.

And yet, George was still the romantic: forever searching for that one rose in a field of dandelions. For that one last implication that life wasn’t quite as hopeless as it had always seemed. He hated his head, and the stupid thoughts he could never quite let go of.

George ducked inside a bookshop on the corner of the lane: content to browse the aisles for a quarter of an hour, and leave Cam to whatever might become of him. He wouldn’t call himself heartless, just realistic. He knew no one was coming back for him in life, so he didn’t see why he shouldn’t do anything but the same.

But George ducked inside  _ the _ bookshop on the corner of  _ the _ lane, and the world folded out to him in the path to an answer he was yet to comprehend the question to.

“If you’re not buying anything, you can get out.” 

The voice cut swiftly into George’s resolve: making quick work of wiping the gleeful smile from his face - suddenly it didn’t feel so much like he’d escaped anything anymore. Defeated, he slouched against the wall, dragging his eyes around the bookshop, as if the answers might suddenly willingly present themselves to him.

The shop was just the one room, small, and cluttered from wall to wall with shelves and shelves of aged books. Despite the cramped conditions, despite the smell of decay and a century old family dinner gripping the room, George found it homely. More than that, it seemed to resonate the colour gold. Not the polished, fake gold lined up behind display cabinets on high street windows - not preened and ground down to perfection. The shop was the gold you found - the great shimmering lumps within the muddy earth. A sort of last hope, perhaps.

George’s smile soon returned to him, breathing in the warm air: old candles, burnt wax, cigarette smoke, tar - from the rotting floorboards to the yellowing walls. George threw his head back against the wall.

“I  _ said _ .” The voice repeated, this time with far more insistence. “If you’re not  _ buying _ anything… you can get  _ out _ .”

Smirk worn across his lips, George was ablaze. World erupting in forever, ardent flames. He envied them. He’d long grown bored of being the one to hold the match; he dreamed to dance amidst the flames, to feel fear, to feel pain, to feel passion, to feel love, all intertwined: forever.

It wasn’t until the shop assistant repeated his words for the  _ third _ time that George found it within himself to pay him any attention. 

“ _ You can get o- _ ”

“What makes you think I’m not buying anything?” George pulled himself away from the wall, moving with a new life, as if his spirit had ignited a new fire inside of his chest: vivacious roaring flames.

“I’m not stupid.” The shop assistant remained stern and sincere, folding arms over his chest, even as George made quite the show out of plucking a book from the shelf, examining the cover extensively.

He turned his attention to the blurb, putting the words behind his lips like he had the slightest clue what they did really mean. “It’s love at first sight for high school student Arnie Cunningham when he and his best friend Dennis Guilder spot the dila-pi...a...d… dilapa-”

There came a snort from behind the counter. George’s eyes widened in disbelief, as if such a nerve was truly inconceivable.

“You’ve never read a book in your life.” The boy’s voice continued with the utmost assurance.

George rolled his eyes, taking a step forward and sliding the dusty paperback across the counter. Such confidence was soon to be shattered in two, as he drew his gaze up to the cashier, who remained certain and expectant, boring holes into George’s shoulders with those dark narrow eyes.

He swallowed. Hard. Daring to cling to his gaze for a minute longer, before the air began to decay around them, leaving them as statues in the dust - no more than words upon the page. Forever to be glazed over and so very soon forgotten.

“I’ll buy it.” George insisted, yet with half the confidence he’d had before.

The cashier cracked a smile, staring up at him with those eyes, that even from behind obnoxiously large, round spectacles, seemed to command the room: drawing everything into their great inky black abyss. George drew his eyes down to obscenely pink lips stretched out into a smile, revealing slightly crooked teeth, and called himself no exception.

He brushed a hand back through his hair, pushing billowing chestnut curls away from his face - appearing somewhat ashen in the low light - and lifted the paperback from the counter. A smirk tugged at his lips.

“King?” He uttered, amused.

“Hmm…?” George furrowed his brow, imploring further.

“Stephen King.” The boy supplied, almost mechanically, staring up at George from behind golden rimmed glasses. “Don’t tell me you-”

“I  _ know _ who Stephen King is.” George could say that at least, fighting to regain some sort of barb to his voice. “ _ Carrie _ .” He reached for the book, flipping it over to its front cover, only to find himself dejected and confused.

“You’ve never read him, have you?” The boy continued, taking the book back from George’s grasp; small, soft fingertips brushed against his own.

George saw no point in supporting a crumbling wall, and shook his head, managing a much more genuine smile as he looked back down at the boy; he was almost beguiling in the low light, as if he seemed to radiate the kind of elegance that was lost in dirty streets and cramped terraced houses.

“Christine.” He explained, pointing to the title displayed upon the front.

“Yeah, believe it or not - I  _ can _ read.” George insisted: unsure as to whether the curly haired cashier did quite believe him.

He flipped the book back over to its cover. “Dilapidated.” He supplied, smirk twitching at the corner of his lips. “They spot the  _ dilapidated _ 1958 red and white-”

“Does he name all his books after girls?” George mused, struggling to place just what it was about the boy that had him quite so transfixed. Whatever it was, it didn’t seem as if it spoke in words George could quite understand.

“No.” George received what he would have defined as an unfair eye roll in response. “Christine’s the name of the car, anyway.”

“Oh…” George gave a shrug. “Is it any good? Is it a… dil...a-dapated… book?”

The cashier struggled to hide a smile. “Dilapidated means destroyed, ruined, basically. So no. And I don’t know - I haven’t read it.”

“You  _ work  _ here.” George’s eyes grew wide, tapping against the wall as if it might emphasise his point. “That’s like working in a butcher’s and never having had a sausage before.”

“Christine by Stephen King isn’t the  _ sausage _ of literature.” He responded rather shortly, as if he couldn’t quite decide whether he was quite tired of George yet.

“Yeah, well… you  _ should _ know whether it’s any good…” George trailed off, unsure as to what else he quite had to say for himself.

“Why don’t you read it yourself and find out?” He curled his lips up into a smirk. “Three ninety nine.”

George drew out a sigh, sucking his cheeks into his mouth for a brief moment: pondering how best to phrase the matter at hand. “Look, you’re lovely, and I respect you, and trust you, and-....  _ Look _ , I’ll buy the book if you look after my weed until tomorrow.”

The cashier arched his eyebrows, staring down at George like he simply couldn’t quite believe a word leaving his lips. Yet, he appeared far more content with the notion than George could have possibly expected.

“If you give me twenty percent then sure.” He leaned forward, captivating George’s gaze entirely. 

“Twenty percent of what?” George muttered, almost mindlessly, as he found his eyes glued to the strand of hair that had fallen across his left cheek, and how it twitched with every movement of his lips.

“The  _ weed _ .” He supplied, like it was obvious, and really, it was - if just less so to George.

George’s eyes wide, as if he entirely struggled to believe the mere preposition. He snorted, shaking his head and laughing in his face.

“Alright then,  _ fine _ .” He folded his arms back across his chest, somewhat disheartened. “Keep your weed. Fuck knows why you’d even want me to look after it, I mean-”

“None of your business.” George interjected, finishing for him. He regarded the boy for a minute longer: forever struggling to figure him out. “ _ Twenty percent _ ? You look like you’ve never smoked anything in your life.”

The laugh George was faced with was loud and abrasive, fitting into an imperfect bittersweet harmony with the warm, entrancing look to his eyes - framed perfectly behind long black lashes.

“Look at you, here - buying a book.” He gestured down to ‘Christine’, lying ignored upon the countertop. “We’re all full of surprises.”

George’s cheeks turned an obnoxious flamingo pink. “I didn’t come in here to buy the book, I-”

“ _ I know _ .” The boy assured him, reaching his hand out as George dug into his coat pocket, stunned beyond comprehension: words laid out in a language he was quite yet to understand.

-

George found himself acquainted with a surprisingly uneventful afternoon. He had instead expected that someone,  _ anyone _ , might have enquired after the weed, as that was exactly why he’d sought to hide it in the first place. Yet instead there was a rather large amount of nothing - an extended silence, as if the world might forever remain still.

He couldn’t help but remain eternally dubious of the bookshop boy with the curly hair, and the ever-enthralling eyes shimmering from behind round lenses, and the apparent aptitude in rolling more than just the corner of a page. George couldn’t avoid the fact that he’d caught his attention; even in that dingy little bookshop, he’d stood out like a peacock amongst hens - something this derelict little town might finally have to say for itself, brought forth in the form of a sweater-wearing boy from the bookshop.

Yet that was the thing. They’d all looked beautiful once. When they’d been new and exciting ideas, in the place of real people with thoughts and feelings that George might have to pretend he cared enough to adhere to. The notion of it all was somewhat sociopathic, but George knew his angle was far more up the street of apathy. Coming from a cramped living room in the house of ‘being too high to give a shit’. It was a place he knew well.

He felt rather lost that afternoon, without the weed, without anything much to say for himself, and the drowned out halfway worry regarding Cam’s whereabouts. He didn’t doubt that he’d come back and find him within the week, and as thus didn’t spare much of a concern either way.

In the end, he found himself perched upon a stone wall towards the outskirts of town come afternoon. In contrast to the morning, he found the world to bare very little meaning at all, as he found himself in a whole new state of captivation, almost an odd kind of enthralled, with a cigarette strewn out between long, messy fingers, and wavering clouds of cigarette smoke drifting across the pages, chasing yellowing trails behind words George struggled to quite fully understand.

Despite himself, he was ever so determined - on a desperate search for answers to life’s eternal questions, or at least just enough to relay to a more than decently pretty boy in a bookshop the following day. Something to prove he had indeed read a book in his life; something to plead that he was more than the person he’d thought he was, more than just the guy who’d dropped off his weed. 

Really, George felt himself stupid for trusting him, and so much so on the basis of his appearance, as this was just the beginning of every story that had ever turned out wrong. He was certain bookshop boy could assure him of that. But George had always been looking for more in life than he could find in the first few chapters of a paperback, or in cautious smiles on the faces of halfway beautiful strangers, and the sullen look of everyone he’d ever let down.

He dreaded seeing Cam again. For reasons other than the ones he’d care to admit. He dreaded seeing Cam again because he wasn’t all confidence and disregard. He dreaded seeing Cam again because he’d fucked up, and George more than halfway cared.

The thought haunted him until the evening drew near, and the dark skies welcomed a familiar figure to his side: taking her place on the wall beside him like she owned it. Like she owned him too. Maybe she had once.

“Are you…  _ reading _ ?” Her voice was teasing, but the element of genuine shock was unwelcomingly pleasant.

George drew his eyes up to meet hers, avoiding the insistence of her gaze with a roll of his eyes, holding the cover of the book up for her to see.

“‘Christine’?” She raised her eyebrows, reaching forward and talking the cigarette from his fingers: dangling limply over the wall.

George followed her movements with a sluggish gaze - as if he only halfway considered insisting otherwise. As if he only halfway wanted to smoke anymore. He watched her instead: hazel eyes growing dark with fixation upon the paperback held between George’s fingers.

“ _ Why _ are you reading?” She asked him outright: blunt as usual - although never out malice but instead just mere curiosity. George had always liked that about her; she always had the guts to be honest, and not just when it suited what anyone else might like to hear.

George thought for a moment; unsure as to how he might put the answer into words. As truth be told, it was far from making the most perfect sense as it was, even as it remained hidden up inside his own head.

“Look…” He drew out a sigh, giving ‘Christine’ the honour of one final pitiful glance, before messily shoving the book back into his jacket pocket. “Chelsea, honestly, I’m not really sure.”

“Hmm?” She raised her eyebrows, curling her lips up into a smirk, as she stared across at George in nothing more than blatant amusement.

“I had to hide the weed.” George offered up his final hope at an explanation. “I know I  _ said _ -”

“You’ve _ lost _ it?” Her eyes widened in disbelief, taking George for all he was worth - his words like pleaded offerings against her statue.

“Oh fuck off, it’s not lost. I know exactly where it is.” George spat, reaching out and pulling his cigarette back from her grasp. He put it back up to his lips, taking an overly extended drag as he stared her down with all the integrity he had left to his name.

“Where is it then?” Chelsea continued: exigent.

George inhaled sharply; unsure how he was possibly ought to explain the rather questionable reasoning that he’d ran with that morning. 

“Is it with Cam?” In George’s silence, she pressed him further, but was quick to notice the way George grimaced at the mention of his name. “So it’s not, then.”

George buried his world in a cloud of smoke, hiding away the best he could: longing for great white clouds to shroud him forever. “Cam’s…” He trailed off - once again, lost for words.

“You broke up.” It didn’t take much to fill in the gaps.

“We were  _ never _ together!” George burst into a fit of laughter: overcompensating, eternally. He knew however, that Chelsea was forever bound to come to her own conclusions about things, regardless of what was said otherwise.

“Okay, you never said the word ‘boyfriend’, but… you had a  _ thing _ .” Chelsea leaned forward, snatching the cigarette back from George’s fingers. As disgruntled as he was, he still didn’t quite have it within him to argue otherwise.

“We didn’t have  _ anything _ \- fuck off-”

“You only never said the word ‘boyfriend’ because you were too scared to.” There wasn’t a hint of fear in her voice, yet in contrast, George was gripped: frozen, as if his insides were burning up inside his chest. 

“I’m not scared of fucking anything.” George insisted, looking at her like she was mad. Like she didn’t know him at all. Like he was beyond her. Beyond everyone else. Up above the rest of the world. 

George’s eyes bore holes in her skin as if the brickwall he sat upon was instead a golden throne up high above in heaven. Like that was something he could believe in. It was all a facade; it was forever all lies.

“You are.” Chelsea told him - matter-of-factly. “You’re scared of getting attached, you’re scared of losing people. You’re scared of meaning anything to anyone  _ ever.  _ You’re scared of going home, and that’s why, because you’re  _ scared _ -”

George didn’t let her finish. “It’s with a boy who works in the bookshop on the high street. He’s got curly hair and glasses. Please don’t go and threaten him to get it back - he’s quite sweet, really.”

Chelsea rolled her eyes. “Is he going to be your boyfriend, then? Or… are you going to have a  _ thing _ , or is he just another nobody? Someone you’re too scared to let in.”

George sucked his bottom lip back between his teeth. “I let you in.” His voice was quiet, wavering.

“Only because I forced you to.” She shook her head, looking across at George like still, despite the months, she barely knew him at all. “You-”

George interjected once more. “I had to hide it because the police showed up. Well, one guy. But… we were in plain sight, so we had to leg it, and-... Cam just froze. Like still. Like didn’t move. He just… he was just  _ there _ .” George’s eyes glassed over thinking about it.

“Probably because he was scared.” Chelsea rolled her eyes. “So you shouldn’t have left him-”

“Why are you saying I  _ left _ him?” George looked far too offended, considering the fact that it was the truth.

“Because you did.” She told him: beyond certain of it. “Because that’s what you  _ do _ . Shut up, and stop acting like you’re better than me, like you’re better than anybody else. Where do you think Cam is now?”

George gave a shrug. “Police station? Maybe? Home? I don’t know… I don’t  _ care _ -”

“Maybe you  _ should _ .” She snatched the cigarette back, finishing it once and for all, and throwing it down into the dirt. George watched it burn down to nothingness amongst the muck.

“I can’t  _ make _ myself care about someone. I can’t  _ make _ myself love him-”

“It’s not about love, it’s about…” She trailed off, unsure as to quite what to say. “It’s about thinking of other people for once. He loves you. God, he fucking has to, doesn’t he? To put up with you.”

George wasn’t quite sure whether that was a good thing or not.

“The drugs are safe.” George added, in his defence, as if that might have helped the situation somewhat.

“ _ Fuck _ the weed, George.” Chelsea shook her head in disbelief. “It’s not safe, you’ve left it with a stranger - some guy you don’t even know at  _ all _ , and… you  _ left _ Cam too.”

“He’s not a stranger. He’s nice.” George still continued on in his defence. “We had a nice conversation where he took the piss out of me, so I bought the book, and he’s keeping the pot until tomorrow.”

“What’s his name?” She demanded, narrowing her eyes across at George. 

George faltered, eyes growing wide, struggling over words as he drew his mind back to that morning; he had to have told him, hadn’t he? 

“ _ David _ .” George spluttered, fingers crossed behind his back.

“No he’s fucking  _ not _ .” Chelsea shook her head. “You’re such a fucking  _ liar _ , you-”

“How would you  _ know _ ?”

“I can see it in your  _ eyes _ , George.” She drew out a sigh, sliding off the  brickwall and down to her feet, pushing her heels down into the concrete.

He watched her for a moment. Curious whether to see if this was another goodbye: whether he was living through a series of ever impeding breaking points.

“Come on.” She told him, offering out her hand.

“Where?” He stared down at her open palm: dubious.

She rolled her eyes, snatching her hand away. “Where do you think?”

George drew out a sigh, swinging one long leg over the wall, and pushing himself back up onto his feet. He stared down at Chelsea; he was forever towering over the world and she was just no exception.

“I’m not going to get Cam back - that’s all.” George muttered: sullen, but insistent.

“Yeah. I know.” Chelsea reached for his hand regardless. “I’m not a fucking idiot.”

George stared down at their hands, struggling to bite back a smile; maybe everything wasn’t quite as fucked as he’d thought.

“What about the weed then?” He offered, closing his fingers in around Chelsea’s.

“No, you can deal with that yourself.” She told him rather firmly, reaching into the inside pocket of her jacket and retrieving a cigarette from her pack.

“Jesse’s not going to be happy.” George argued, as if that might somehow persuade her, as if she’d ever once given a damn about him.

“As I said.” Chelsea turned to face him, slotting the cigarette between her lips before reaching for her lighter. “You can deal with that yourself.”

George shot her a glare, outstretching his hand and taking the cigarette from her lips before she could argue otherwise.

-

Despite himself, more than anything, George just wanted to go to sleep. When the night drew in, and the air bit with an unpleasant cold, as he stood out in a field, a little way off out of town, barely able to hear his own thoughts over the sounds of rabid conversation.

Perhaps it was all down to the fact that he found himself there - disappointingly sober, as the world lit up around in him in every colour of rainbow, and he stood, remaining a somber grey. The crowds parted and he stared down through the grass, to the guy with his acoustic guitar, plucking out a melody like it might call the angels down from heaven to greet him.

He was wide eyed and grinning. Fair haired, happy crystalline blue eyes. The kind of boy George could ruin. The possibility held a weight upon his shoulders as George stood there. Vacant. Somewhere up in the sky, to look back over his shoulder at the town stretching out a mile or so away.

He wanted to go home. Not  _ home _ . But to Jesse’s. To a mattress on the floor. To peace and quiet. To a bathroom and a toilet that flushed. Burnt toast in the morning. George didn’t want to  _ think _ . George wanted to breathe oxygen not tar. He wanted his lungs to survive the night.

But Jesse wouldn’t talk to him; Chelsea had been right - he’d laid that trap for himself. And day after day, he’d continue to fall into it. And he was so disgustingly sober as a result of it.

He caught sight of her in the crowd: eyes wild, not scared, nothing, floating, like she wasn’t really there - like she’d never really existed. But fuck, she was pretty. Hair tangled and strewn out behind her, makeup smudged across her face, snorting a line off the back of  her hand.

George tore his eyes away, as unfamiliar arms snaked around her waist, and with eyes blown wide, head elsewhere, she connected their lips. He would have watched her if he was high. He would have sat and stared for hours. But disgustingly sober, he stood there, heart low in his chest, and regarded her as little more than disgustingly pretty.

He drew his attention to boy instead. Hair so pale it seemed to shimmer in the light. He seemed ethereal almost, plucking the strings of his guitar like it was the song of angels - much more than just the same three chords, over and over again. But he’d gathered an audience, as anyone halfway decent could, with halfway fucked up girls at every corner.

George watched them watch him for a while. He stood and stared until the very moment he stopped playing. Until the very moment they locked eyes, and the air grew still, stubborn, persistent. George watched as he disappeared off into the crowds - to smile and flirt with girls that wouldn’t matter come morning.

George wasn’t jealous. Just bored.

And far too curious for his own sake.

Heart leaping in his chest: ideas bubbling and frothing from inside of his chest, he followed him. Yet within a minute, he’d lost him in the crowd again: faded away, as if he’d never even the been there, as if the air had been forever still - George wasn’t quite sure either way.

He needed to get something. If not from Jesse then from anyone else; he couldn’t live like this, he couldn’t make it through the night like that. He drew his gaze around, locking eyes with every pretty girl, with every boy with his arms around their waists. George, beyond everything else, was alone.

He continued to push through the crowds, glancing at smiles and pills and powders - a whole world just out of his grasp; Jesse was watching him - he could feel it. He could feel his  _ eyes _ . It was a look he didn’t want to answer to. But he didn’t have much say in the matter after all.

George tore his gaze back under the building pressure - his insides bubbling and boiling as if they were soon to explode. Jesse held his gaze as if to test him, with words left unspoken, but burnt with stern looks into his skin. Around him, stood everyone George knew, with smiles and laughter - Chelsea, John, and Gemma, being the faces he could make out in the crowd.

He didn’t dare to join them. Jesse and Chelsea weren’t alike. They shared the same jokes, the same rooms, but not the same thoughts. Not where it mattered. Perhaps that was why everything had always been so substantially broken. Chelsea cared about people. Jesse cared about drugs. George wasn’t sure where he stood at all.

Before he could quite figure out, arms snaked around his waist and lips were pressed to his cheek; startled as he was, George didn’t quite dare to tear his gaze from Jesse’s. In fact, it was Jesse that moved in the end, turning away to take a cigarette from Gemma’s hand, outstretched towards him.

George leaned back into the touch: into lips trailing down his cheek and onto his neck. After those first tentative moments, he turned in the grip of the arm around his waist and craned his neck down to meet a pair of blue eyes - not twinkling in the low light, like they were sapphires, but instead, rippling and bubbling, ebbing back and forth, as if he was faced with the vast expanse of a leaden ocean. 

He felt himself drowning. It was not in any manner romantic; this wasn’t the movies, but real life. And real life ached and tugged and swallowed you whole.

George let her place his arms around her waist, connecting their lips once more, as he watched her - dazed - like she wasn’t even real. Like she might fade away into the night. Yet the indifference was bitterly grounding.

“You’re not having fun.” She told him; it was easy to draw such a truth out simply from his eyes.

Before George had ample opportunity to even respond, she drew her lips back to his, leaving his jaw hanging slack, and his eyes wide, as though frozen in time. She cracked a smile, and produced two pills from her pocket.

George’s eyes widened immediately, but resorted to watch in silence as she took the first pill and pushed it through his lips and onto his tongue with her fingertips. Motionless, almost devoid of life itself, George watched as she swallowed the second.

“My name’s Eden.” She fixed her gaze on his lips, watched as George swallowed hard, closing his eyes and embracing the world as it came crashing down upon him.

“George.” He managed in response, pulling his arms tighter around her waist and letting the night run away with him.

“Was that better?” She inquired, words spoken in short moments between kisses: heavy on their lips.

George didn’t think about responding, George didn’t think about the truth. He stood there, in unfamiliar arms, and let his eyelids flicker close. He let the world pass him by. He needed it, that night.

“Yeah.” She answered for him in the end: filling in the blanks by herself, and connecting their lips once more.

George let him kiss her. He let them kiss. He let it pretend like it meant something. Like his head wasn’t twisting away from him. Like he’d never be able to catch up to it. This way, at least, they didn’t have to speak; they didn’t have to find each other in meaningless conversation.

She was nice enough. Forward, definitely, but she had pills. And George would let her kiss him. He’d let himself kiss her back. And they’d pretend to be in love just that night.

She wasn’t even halfway pretty, but she was enough. 

He put on a good act: moving like their kisses meant a thing, as if he held the world in his hands, and she was mother nature. He held her gaze, clinging to the harsh look in her eyes, to everything around her with the sharpest edges, like he truly cared for her, like this would last for nights by the dozen.

Yet, if he was being entirely truthful with himself, George stood there; he let himself be moved in her arms, and instead thought of Cam - who he’d left to whatever fate the world might dictate. Cam who he maybe should have gone after, Cam who he maybe shouldn’t have lead on. But all of George’s mistakes, they’d already long been done, and all of George’s answers, they’d always been wrong.

It was a losing game. An endless fight. In eyes burning holes into his body from every direction. The warmth of a stranger. The cold of a bitter, unforgiving winter that clung to them still come May.

George tore his eyes open in the end, just for one second - to take in the lights, to take in the world. He caught sight of people by their dozens: entwined in their own lives and conversations, and yet, one person amidst the crowds seemed to shimmer in the night.

He rubbed his eyes: swearing they had to deceive him, for just for a moment, between the crowd, George thought he saw a familiar face. Dark eyes hidden behind an overflowing mop of cascading brown curls.

Alive. Dancing. More than words on a page. More than echoes long gone. More than memories broken and treasured. More than a broken mirror. More than bloody knuckles. More than bedroom walls - yellowed with tar.

“Is that…” George stretched out an arm, grabbing Eden’s attention.

It was however, the moment that she turned to follow George’s gaze, the very moment that the crowd closed, and any glance of the boy disappeared like a whisper to the breeze.

George swallowed his words and steadied his gaze. It had always just been the drugs. It hadn’t made sense, after all. And he searched for blue eyes beside him, but this time, they were absent too.

George had hoped for too much. He always did.

-


	2. "look down."

The air was warmer: sickly sweet. Still, it felt false, as if the world was still pretending. As if everything and everyone was forever fake. Every effort cast into the perpetuation of an endless charade. A charade, however, that remained cloaked in an uncertain, impenetrable mystery.

Above, the sky lay an astringent shade of blue: cutting deep and leaving permanent scars in the pattern of long lost whispers. The words they dared not to speak anymore. The part of themselves they’d lost in the cold, in the empty mornings, in the pliant, half-hopeful smiles. The part they cared not to get back.

Perhaps it had all been a facade all along. He stared up at her with dark eyes blown wide, as if he needed to take that spirit and smile from her and draw it deep inside himself to finally feel whole again. He didn’t doubt it might break her, but that served no hindrance at all.

He focused instead upon her as a whole - on her better aspects: on her hair gleaming like copper in the midday sun. Yet still, as beautiful as it was, as pretty as she was, copper simply was not gold. It was fruitless. Eternal grey skies. They were condemned - like sinners at hands from above - to live like this, forever.

Fervent, she proceeded, living out the hour as if the boy before her regarded her with more than placid contempt. Under the light, under the heat of the midday sun, she left the world to its own issues and concerns, and kissed him.

Desperate, they receded. From sixteen, to the children they once were: young and dumb and innocent, playing out in the sun, in the grass and dirt. They closed their eyes and clung to the illusion; for they were forever young, as long as their hearts declined to beat.

She pulled away as the sky darkened - blue fading out to grey. Her eyes flickered tentatively across his face, searching for any hope of something more: any emotion inflicted by her actions, anything she could grasp onto. Something they could hold out in their hands. Something they could call their own.

There was nothing. Nothing at all.

She sunk down from her tiptoes as the sun ducked behind a cloud, throwing her head back against the wall - the back of the Geography classroom - before taking in a sigh.

Conversation eluded them. Yet they found no reason to chase after it. He stretched his head back, tipping dark, protruding eyes up to the sky: taking in the sudden overcast rain, and making love to every single shade of grey. He was thankful, in earnest.

It was a sign, of some degree; the world telling him to give up, to give in. That this wasn’t perfect, that nothing would ever be. Yet despite that, despite everything, he still didn’t quite have the guts to go through with it.

He stared at her: auburn hair growing mottled and dark with the rain - no longer a glistening copper, but a leaden brown at best. Eyes vacant, to the floor, to her feet, sinking into the soil: black shoes - patent leather, scuffed and dull with specks of dirt.

It was a sign. If there ever was one.

And still, he withdrew - joining her, with his back to the wall, brushing waterlogged curls from his cheeks as he stared out into the air, urging the rain to pass.

Droplets pounded upon the ground with the force of dozens of tiny fists, as if with the malice and intent to attack, to force some sort of confession from the shrunken, pleading ground. To beat a new, better world out of the broken earth. The rain was tired. The skies were ever-knowing, and ever-forgotten, resigned to their own disgust. At least, he knew, he was not alone.

He dug into his pocket, producing a slightly squashed packet of cigarettes. She turned her head, watching with wide, bloodshot eyes as he reached for the last cigarette, putting it to his lips, and stumbling with his lighter - struggling to light it in the rain.

Eventually, however, with hands cupped tightly around the end, he succeeded. 

“I hate it when you smoke.” The words slipped her lips without warning; yet she found no urge to take them back.

He exhaled, puffing out a cloud of smoke into her face, as if just to make a point. And still, he wondered why she didn’t love him.

She didn’t say a word; she didn’t give him that privilege. Instead, she watched, eyes burning holes into his cheeks, flushed red with the sudden cold, and dreamt up a world in which it had not turned out like this.

“I hate it when you bitch at me.” He turned his head, at least having the nerve to look her in the eye. “I hate it when you tell me how to live my life. What to do, whether to smoke,  _ who to be _ .”

“Like I’ve  _ ever _ …” She shook her head, trailing off - it wasn’t worth the bother. He’d argue and he’d argue for days, stubborn and petulant: forever the child he’d once been. “I hate it when you smoke. That’s all.”

“I hate it when you wear your hair like that.” He supplied, words balanced on the tip of his tongue like they weighed nothing at all. But they tugged and tore and burned away at her skin, tearing her down with the thundering pace of the rain. 

He didn’t. He didn’t care. He’d never once cared. But still, he put up a fight: forever stubborn, forever arrogant, forever all what he could never hope to be.

“That’s just…” She shook her head, not far off speechless. “That’s just  _ rude _ . That’s just… you really are a  _ horrible _ person, Matty.”

He stared. He smoked and stared. Still. Hesitant. Unsure whether he could quite disagree.

The moment stretched out for years in his mind, but by the world’s reckoning, little more than two minutes had passed.

“Charlotte…” He drew out a sigh, wishing he could fix this, despite all he knew, he still looked at her and hoped they might one day build a castle from the broken ruins.

“What?” Her voice was brash, insistent, tired. Tired of him, tired of them, tired of the rain, tired of clouds of smoke, tired of cold, dark eyes, tired of hiding away, tired of skipping class, tired of stupid boys with tired eyes and forever excuses.

He opened his mouth to speak.

She stopped him. “Doesn’t matter.”

For a moment, just one, he thought about protesting, about spewing bullshit, about making this beautiful: about drawing hope and love out of broken pieces of shattered glass.

Yet, he relented, he watched, eyes narrow and dark, shrouded with sorrow and confusion and hell itself in human form. He watched her walk away and felt nothing at all.

He was a horrible person. She was right; he’d known it. There’d been something - forever - but much more prevalent in recent months. It was  _ something _ : something wrong. He’d sought to blame her, but had always known it bore an equal weight upon the both of them.

He only knew, however, in that very moment, as raindrops pooled and fell from his brow, that the problem was sourced, in fact, exclusively within himself.

Matty finished his cigarette, pressing the stump into the dirt underfoot, before retreating out from behind the building, pushing through the bushes, and out into the schoolyard, to stare, with lost vacant eyes, through his barren surroundings.

Yet even as the bell did finally sound for their lunch hour, Matty remained frozen. Like a statue, perfectly crafted from marble, like a long lost hero, or perhaps even a god. Someone with an epic saga crafted out in their name - someone who had perhaps once meant something. Someone who’d done more than pick a fight with a girl between the bushes behind the Geography classroom.

It took the movement of students, crowding and running around him with laughter and life, to break him from the spell, to leave him blinking, stumbling to keep his balance as the rain cleared up, leaving him to shiver out in the cold as his shirt clung to his chest, and his hair stuck to his cheek, hanging limp, as if holding no evidence of the bouncing curls that it had held before.

Reluctant footsteps brought him through the crowds: pushing through students, taking in the stares until he reached the bench at the other side of the yard. Finding hope, at least, in the two familiar faces waiting for him.

“Matty, mate… what the  _ fuck _ …?” Eyes were blown wide, watching him intently as he sat down, shivering slightly as he pulled his knees up into his chest.

He didn’t know quite what to say for himself, instead turned to his left and shot a pleading kind of hopeless look up to one of his two best friends. 

Ross returned the look with a sympathetic smile, hiding his nerves the best he could as he pulled an arm around Matty’s shoulders and pulled him closer.

“Have you just been stood out in the rain all of maths, or…?” From across the bench, eyes lingered on him tentatively: flickering between Ross and Matty, as he struggled to quite figure out what to make of the situation that had befallen them.

“Adam, mate… give him your coat-”

“Uhh…” Adam stalled, unsure as to whether Ross was really being sincere or not. “I…” He moved his hands up to his shoulders, as if to pull it from his shoulders, but stopped, eyes falling back upon Matty.

“He’s  _ freezing _ .” Ross stared Adam down, as if he couldn’t quite believe that he was being serious here. “Look at him, he’s shivering.”

It was true, as much as Matty sought to hide it. “I’m not.” Even as much as he sought to deny it.

Neither of the boys gave his protests any attention, as Adam reluctantly pulled his coat from his shoulders and passed it across the table for Ross to drape over Matty’s shoulders, watching as he reluctantly pushed his arms into the sleeves.

“I’m  _ fine _ .” Matty told them: insistently. With his eyes screwed shut and his cheek pressed into the bone of Ross’ shoulder. Needless to say, he didn’t exactly hold the most convincing of cases.

“Just hate maths that much?” Adam raised an eyebrow, hoping to bring some relief from humour, to make the situation just that little bit more light-hearted.

Matty gave a shrug, feeling his hair drip down onto Adam’s coat. He tried not to feel bad about it.

“Yeah, just… just…  _ maths _ .” He went for in the end, continuing on like he could even dream of a world in which Adam and Ross might have been stupid enough to believe him.

The two boys, however, shared a look: tentative and fleeting, as if they dared not to continue, instead begging for the moment to remain frozen in time, for them to sit forever that lunchtime, with the world hesitant to warm up around them, with concern upon their faces. As Matty sat with his eyes screwed shut, as if he was truly scared of the sunlight; his hair continued to drip onto Adam’s coat.

Ross relented in the end. He was very much one for doing things the right way, however that may turn out to be, however much Matty might hate him for it. But Matty liked him. He was tall and he didn’t take shit from anyone. 

Matty sometimes just plainly wanted to be him. Brave. Honest.  _ Genuine _ . Living in a world where things had ended as they should, where had the courage to speak his mind. And what lay inside his chest, so fundamentally broken, refused to prey upon his mind. For even, in his deepest, darkest fantasies, he could never quite paint himself a world in which it had eluded him entirely.

“Charlotte’s pissed…” Ross bit his lip, drawing his gaze up to the sky - slowly returning to its former, iridescent blue. “At you, I think. I don’t know.”

“No.” Adam interjected, watching Matty carefully. “It’s pretty obvious it’s at him.”

Ross shot him a glare, mouthing something that might have once vaguely resembled ‘you’re not helping’.

“Yeah…” Matty drew out a sigh. “It’s at me.”

“Oh, are you going to-”

Matty didn’t let Ross finish. “No, no I’m not.”

“But she’s-”

“Fuck her.” Matty concluded, eyes to the ground; voice feeble, weak, strewn from anything but malice. “She can talk to me if she really wants to - I don’t care otherwise.”

Of course, really, Matty did. Matty cared in more ways than he could ever care to admit. And they knew that. Adam and Ross. Of course they did.

They didn’t stop looking at him like his heart was about to collapse all day. Like he was on the verge of a breakdown: forever moments away from dropping to his knees and screaming out her name on a curse. They looked at him like they knew him through and through. But really, they didn’t.

Because really, Matty felt nothing at all.

-

Under the sheepish afternoon sun, Matty was met with an all too familiar smile: the smile of a stranger, yet one that had played out forever at the back of his mind. 

His day had been dismal, to say the least. Yet in contrast to everything else, in contrast to the rain, to the argument, to the meaningless kisses, to the concerned looks, to the disappointed ones too, it was grounding. Seeing a smile like that. 

Seeing his smile like that. Seeing the boy - well over six feet tall, with messy bleached hair, and a sort of all-knowing look set into his dark eyes. It was something. To say the least.

Matty stopped in his tracks, just a few metres before the bookstore, watching the boy. Watching him watch him back. Watching the smoke drift from his lips and out into the afternoon air. Watching him kick at the ground with the toe of his boots, scuffing up the pavement.

He didn’t doubt that he might forever cease to pinpoint it, but this boy, whoever he was, whatever he was - he was really  _ something _ .

Frozen as before, Matty was left to watch as he stomped his cigarette out onto the pavement with his foot, steadily approaching him with a forever unreadable look in those eyes.

“Got my weed?” He kept the tone light, speaking as if, somehow, that wasn’t the most urgent matter he had to discuss. Whoever he was, Matty couldn’t deny that he was a liar, and a good one at that.

Matty felt his cheeks flushing a gentle sunrise pink, as his hands stretched down into the pockets of his jeans, almost certain he’d managed to leave it elsewhere, and that this boy was going to slaughter him for it. However, by some miracle, his fingers clasped around the small plastic bag that had been forced onto him the day before.

“Yeah…” His voice was muffled, hesitant, not quite daring to make eye contact; stealing a quick look to the ground before he cleared his throat, and extended the weed out to him.

Almost tentatively, he reached out and took the bag from those small, unreasonably delicate fingertips. Still, despite the business that had been settled, his gaze prevailed: surveying Matty as if he, too, could feel that fundamental sense of upset - something so very amiss.

Matty dreamt that he was courageous type and that he would have met him with wide, daring eyes, and barked a demand with a snarl; he would have told him to ‘fuck off’, to leave him alone, to draw a line under their something, under their anything. But Matty wasn’t.

Matty was shaking all over - from his fingers to his knees. And this time, in the midst of a relatively pleasant afternoon, it was clear it was not just from the cold.

The boy watched and watched him. The moments panned out for days as those dark eyes burrowed little holes to call home inside of Matty’s chest. 

Matty wanted him out; he wanted his own air to breathe, he wanted a room to himself, in disarray or not, he wanted safety, he wanted to own the right to his own discomfort. He wanted this boy, and his forever contemplative smile,  _ gone _ .

His teeth were chattering too.

Yet the boy considered the weed for a moment more, before hastily stuffing it inside his jacket pocket.

When he looked back up Matty’s eyes had grown wide with fear - an animalistic kind of frightened, as if he was in fact no more than a deer, frozen in the impeding beam of car headlights.

“Hey…” His voice was soft, struggling to hold Matty’s gaze, retreating a little way, perhaps in the hopes it might ease up their situation somewhat.

Matty’s eyes darted about the street, taking in the few pedestrians across the other side of the street, before finally settling upon that placid smile, and that undeserving warmth he held in his eyes, staring Matty down as if he commanded his heart, body, and soul.

“Look…” He drew out a sigh, desperate to pan out the silence, to put right whatever was so evidently wrong. Perhaps he should have just run - called this over and be done with it, but it was this time that he didn’t.

“Hey, I can see, you smoked like half the weed. And maybe I should be pissed off at you for that, but…” He trailed off, shaking his head. “I’m really not. I mean… I mean… there’s clearly something wrong, and if it helped then it  _ helped _ and that’s good. We all need it like that sometimes.”

Matty shook his head, drawing his world inside his chest with one shaky breath. With a moment to himself, he found the courage to speak. 

“It’s not that- it’s… I’m sorry. I’m fuck-... I… it’s been a bad day.” Matty concluded, staring down at his shoes, kicking at the pavement absent-mindedly.

“Yeah?” He wrapped his lips around a smile, daring to take that one step closer. “Me too.”

Matty regarded him - elusive stoner boy, as if he’d never quite considered him capable of such emotion before. It was grounding. Like before. Like this was something. Something else entirely. Matty clung to that; he had to.

“Oh… I… I’m sorry.” Matty managed an apology: undeserved but desperate.

“It’s not your fault.” He watched him for a minute more. “Hey… what’s your name?”

Matty’s eyes darted up, growing wide with the sudden realisation that despite this all, despite everything he might have felt, they were still just  _ strangers _ .

“Matty.” He mumbled, cheeks heating up under his gaze: warm like the sun that had eluded them for so longer. 

“George.” He offered, taking the liberty of another step closer: a steady, tentative approach. “Hey…  _ Matty _ .” 

“Mmm…?” He swallowed hard, his name on George’s lips destined to echo around his mind for time eternal.

“You’re upset. I’m upset. Fuck the shop, come with me and let’s finish the weed?” George spoke with the kind of unbreakable confidence that Matty couldn’t deny intimidated him, but still, that warmth, that softness, was ever present in his eyes.

Perhaps, despite all he thought of himself, it was that look in George’s eyes, and that look alone that had reduced Matty to whim. He knew in every cell of his body that this was a bad idea, that George was a stranger, that he had a  _ job _ to go to, but still, with a soft smile, and a small nod, he agreed.

George was overly pleased; it was the kind of happiness that bordered upon smug, and all in all, Matty couldn’t quite bring himself to trust it - to trust him. Still, despite sense itself, he followed this boy and his bag of weed down the main street, and through town.

Matty resigned himself to quiet, to wordlessness and let George fill in their gaps. He was good at it; Matty could tell. Overcompensating. He laughed the loudest and he smiled the widest, but his eyes never quite lit up to match. 

The look he’d worn back at the shop, with Matty collapsing inside of himself had been something else entirely; the minutes it took Matty to realise that were pivotal, standing out, even then, as vital - not just part of living, but part of his  _ life _ .

“Where are we going?” Matty only spoke up as they reached the outskirts of town, caught off guard by the definitive look in George’s eyes; he seemed to sure enough  _ know _ where he was going - this was more than just a desperate attempt to find somewhere to call home for a few hours. He was instead walking with intent, with knowledge, with something to call a destination.

Matty was jealous. Of the elusive boy. With the weed. With the warm eyes. Of George. But his jealousy didn’t burn like flames. Instead, it trickled like a stream, like a forever moving current; perhaps one day it might sweep him off his feet and out to sea, but for the time being, for the slow afternoon, he was content to let the water run over his feet.

“You’ll see.” George hit him with a grin, ambiguous as ever. Matty was in two minds about pressing him further, but before he could quite make his mind up, the winding path to the woods crawled out over the horizon and fate laid itself out in open palms.

They shared a smile - the two of them.

Matty stopped and stared. With eyes wide open, with heart beating to a steady rhythm, he took in the world before him: a blossoming spring that had evaded them all this time. It seemed as if nature herself had held a grudge upon the town, upon the dreary people, upon their dreary lives, upon their sullen faces and disheveled houses, upon grey streets and greyer skies. 

“Is this alright?” George came to a halt as Matty did, digging his feet into the winding dirt path as Matty eyes scanned the horizon. “I mean, we-”

“Yeah.” Matty didn’t let him finish, heart, not leaping in his chest, but perhaps just getting to its feet, standing in an unexplained ovation. This was something; this was a  _ moment _ . 

Matty looked at George. They were alive.

Despite the silence, George somehow seemed to read his mind, digging into his jacket pocket for the weed, stopping to hastily roll a joint. Matty watched him exhale, pushing away the whole world in a puff of smoke. He was captivating like that - a boy from a movie screen,  _ almost _ . But not quite. Never quite. Matty could never sustain such an illusion for longer than a moment.

George continued down the path, leaving Matty to follow him, eyes wide, trusting - so young and so dumb, as he took the joint from George’s fingers, ghosting against his own. Tingles ran through his fingers, down his arm, right into his chest, and down his spine. 

Stupid as he was, Matty inhaled a simple kind of everything into his lungs, and concluded that it just must have been the drugs. A steady forever high, a calm forever life that he secretly dreamt to live.

In his own head, Matty was alive. Alive not in the physical sense, alive not with blood through his veins, but alive in words, in sagas, in epics, upon the page. Matty was alive, forever in other people’s heads. He wanted to live on in infinity like that. To live a life worth something, to be free, to be  _ alive _ , truly, by his own definition.

The first drag felt like that.

Matty wasn’t stupid enough to deny the meaning behind that; the way it all entwined, the way it would surely bring him to an unforgiving end. As still, even now, the concerned words of his friends echoed throughout his head. And even as he met George’s eyes, building himself a home inside that warmth, tugging and pulling at his insides, like he ought to be closer, like distance itself was foreign. 

Even then, Matty stood with the build of high, strong inside his chest, and saw her laugh, saw her smile, saw hair drained on its sheen out in the rain, and heard those words, wondering if they might ever evade him -  _ ‘I hate it when you smoke’ _ .

Matty stared down at the joint, and sought to take the whole world in with every breath - to find something beautiful to replace her, something else to drown out those words. Or to cover those eyes - forever condemned to blink back at him, like headlights in the dark: a winding midnight road - one he yearned to get lost on.

“So, dare I ask…” George’s voice almost seemed ethereal, floating through the spring breeze as the two ventured down the path and into the trees. “What made your day so bad?”

Matty tilted his head up to the sky: resigning himself to watch as the trees around them grew tall, veering on foreboding as they cloaked the sky entirely with layers upon layers of branches and leaves. He stared up at the few slithers of light that made their way down to the ground regardless; he thought they were brave.

He felt George’s eyes upon him: eager for a response, eager to solve the puzzle of the boy from the bookshop with the curls and the glasses. Matty just wasn’t sure if he was ready to give himself up like that.

“Charlotte. Her name’s Charlotte.” He continued, regardless. For the look in George’s eyes. For the slithers of light. For the vehement green of the forest floor.

George nodded, sucking his lip back inside of his mouth, as if he almost feared to quite commit himself to any form of response.

In his silence, Matty continued, letting George lead him deep into the woods - to get lost out there together. Despite all that common sense had ever once taught him; he couldn’t help but fancy the notion.

“She’s quite pretty. You know…  _ quite _ . Quite pretty. She’s nice enough. Quite nice. You know…  _ quite _ …?” 

George raised his eyebrows - as if, even at this point, he could see exactly where this story was going.

“And she’s… she’s… I don’t know… she’s pretty and sweet and she’s my girlfriend, but… I don’t know, maybe it’s because we had an argument today, but, thing is, we have a lot of arguments, and… I don’t know. Maybe that’s a thing within itself…” Matty drew out a sigh.

Moments passed: silent, still. Matty glanced around at the surroundings, at the trees forever closing in upon the two of them. He exhaled. And inhaled. And again. And again.

“I don’t love her, though.” Inhale. Exhale. Again. And again.

To George, the solution appeared perfectly simple, and he chose to suggest it as such. “Break up with her.”

Matty shook his head, as if the idea was just entirely foreign. “It doesn’t quite work like that. I think… maybe… I mean, I’m  _ sixteen _ , can we really fall in love at sixteen? Properly, I mean…? Right now, maybe it’s never going to be love.”

George’s eyes widened. “Fuck, are you only sixteen?” 

Matty swallowed, stopping in his tracks, cheeks flourishing with heat. “Yeah.” He saw no way around it, despite the surprise evident in George’s eyes. “W-Why? How old are you?”

“Eighteen.” George drew in a sigh, as if seeking to take the whole world in through his lungs. In taking the joint back from Matty, his hand curled up around it and his whole body seemed to freeze over.

“Stop looking at me like I’m half your age - you’re two years older. “ Matty scoffed, desperate to fight the reddening of his cheeks, longing to appear those two years older George had assumed him to be.

George fixed his eyes upon him, watching the way the slithers of sunlight caught his face - from the tip of his nose, to the glimmer of his eyes. 

“You’re…” George trailed off, not quite sure of what to say for himself at all. He stared down at the joint instead, before finally taking it to his lips, after several distant, lonely moments. “Should I even be… giving you weed at sixteen?”

“Yeah, because it’s not like I’ve never smoked before.” Matty rolled his eyes, staring George down for a good moment. “I’m sixteen - not six. I am the same person I was as when you thought I was your age, you know? In fact, that was in the past, so technically, I was younger.”

George shook his head - not quite sure what to think. “When I was sixteen, last thing I fucking needed was getting involved with someone like me.”

Matty couldn’t help but laugh. With that elusive courage he so desired, he stood up as tall as he could manage, and stared George down, laughter escaping his chest.

“ _ What _ ?” George barked, eyes growing dark - almost offended; still, Matty couldn’t quite take him seriously.

“What’s that supposed to  _ mean _ ?” Matty, to contradict their situation, was in fact, all smiles, all wide manic laughter, as he lead the way through the trees - as if on a mission to get them lost like they had never been before.

“I’m a bad influence-”

“Us getting  _ involved _ ?” Matty snatched the joint back from George - saving him the effort of protest, at the very least. “You invite me off to have a smoke and suddenly we’re getting  _ involved _ ?”

“Oh fuck off.” George rolled his eyes, desperate to tear the smile away from his lips. “I’m just saying… maybe you shouldn’t… get  _ involved _ with me… maybe-”

“You’re the fucking one who invited me out for a smoke- fucking  _ hell _ . You know what? I should be in the shop right now, I should be  _ working _ . I have a  _ shift _ .” Matty raised his hands up into the air in exasperation, staring George down like he was both the best and worst thing that he’d seen that year.

“Then go back to your shift. Give me back the joint and go back to the bookshop.” George waited for a moment, tearing great holes into Matty’s resolve - just with his eyes. It almost scared Matty; the dark, heavy weight of them. Almost.

“No.” Matty laughed it off, like George was nothing, like he knew him inside and out. He didn’t know him at all.

“Exactly.” George drew out a sigh. “That’s that. We’re involved enough for you to ignore your responsibilities for me. And I’m saying,  _ look _ … you don’t know me, and you-”

“Oh fuck off. You’re literally a walking cliche. Like what? What’s so  _ terrible _ about you?” Matty stopped for a moment, staring George down with the nerve to demand an answer. “Who are you? The textbook villain? The backstabbing snake? The trusted friend with the dark shrouded path? The hero with a grave secret? Come on, I’m  _ curious _ .”

George shook his head, quickening his pace, lengthening his strides and powering past Matty down the path. Stunned, Matty remained, feet bolted to the ground for a good ten seconds, before breaking into a run to catch up to him.

“Who are you then, George?” Matty positioned himself in front of George, pushing his hands into his chest to grind him to a halt. Needless to say, the gesture shocked him somewhat.

“Matty… I…” He stumbled, pushing at Matty’s shoulders, before staring down at him - this beautiful,  _ beautiful _ boy. It hit him then. Even in the sunlight.

“Who  _ are _ you then?” Matty continued, beyond resilient, beyond brave, beyond courageous. Perhaps not the same boy he’d woken that morning. George’s eyes and the fire behind them; they’d burned a hole, they’d set something free. Something hidden away deep inside of his chest. “Why did you have a shit day - tell me that at least.”

George looked like he might have genuinely considered punching him, before his eyes grew soft, and he rolled his lips over into a smile, and lead Matty off further into the trees, giving him little more than a smile to go off on until they reached a river.

The river was shallow, barely more than a little stream, but fast moving as it snaked through the trees, as the ground dipped and valleyed slightly, leaving space for a rather rickety bridge to be strewn between the two hills that had sprung up either side.

“Come on.” George turned to Matty, watching as he set his gaze upon the bridge - distrusting it entirely.

“What?” Matty’s eyes grew impossibly wide. “Onto there?”

“Yeah.” George couldn’t subdue his smirk. “Come on - it’s fine, I promise.”

“You took me out here to kill me didn’t you? And that’s why you’re so fussed that I’m sixteen because murdering a minor is morally worse. Isn’t it? I’ve cracked it - haven’t I?” Matty stared George down - part of him not even kidding.

George rolled his eyes, offering Matty no more in the form of explanation before heading up the steep bank of the hill,  stumbling to his feet once he made it up on flat ground. Then, from the top of the hill, leant against the post of the bridge, he stared down at Matty, almost as if he was  _ challenging _ him.

Matty glanced from the bridge, to George, to the hill, to the bridge, to George again. He drew in a deep breath; told himself he was an idiot, but proceeded regardless. This was his kind of brave, this was his kind of something. He knew then, that whoever he was, whatever he thought was so horrific about himself, George was the kind of person stories were told about.

Matty couldn’t resist him. Or at least that look in his eyes. It seemed to scream ‘adventure’ over and over again, until the end of time. He didn’t trust that the bridge was safe. He didn’t trust that George might catch him. But he knew that he was bored, down there in the valley; tired of gazing at people up top.

He struggled to make it up the hill with legs perhaps half the size of George’s, but with George’s broad fingers curling around his arm, and pulling him upwards, he managed it in the end. If not, stumbling into George’s arms somewhat as he finally reached the top.

And as they stood there, very much together, very much involved. Matty’s heartbeat picked up with the wind: fluttering to a half-beat, as the wind rushed in his ears. Yet, it was just the weed. It was just the high. It wasn’t the two of them. It wasn’t George. It couldn’t be. Matty was, after all, yet to know him at all.

“Are you sure that’s  _ safe _ …?” Matty gestured out towards the bridge. From the hill, he could clearly see a part of the bridge that had actually collapsed in upon itself, which really wasn’t the most inviting of things, to say the least.

George laughed with the kind of genuine amusement that a hot blush seering in Matty’s cheeks. “Look down.” He told him.

Despite all common sense, Matty did. 

“Look at the river, I mean - come on, not even a two year old could drown in that, look you’re going to be  _ fine- _ ”

“I mean the  _ height _ , George!” Matty interjected, voice cracking a little with exasperation - it was as amusing as it was embarrassing.

“Look, if you fall, you’ll fall into water so you won’t break your back, and…” George trailed off, voice softening a little. “You won’t. Trust me - I’ll catch you.”

Matty’s eyes grew wide, staring up at George with wide fluttering blinks, as if he couldn’t quite believe the moment itself.

Yet like every single moment, it passed. And Matty’s eyes grew wild: incredulous, staring up at George like he was impossible, like he was the world’s every anomaly stood before him in human form.

“ _ Trust _ you?” His voice was loud - louder than he’d intended, still quite yet to fully take the reality of the situation in. “You’ve spent the last twenty minutes convincing me  _ not _ to.”

George cracked a smile, glancing back to the bridge. “Yeah. Oh come on, you know what I mean.”

And with that, he made his way out onto the bridge, sitting himself down, perfectly calmly, about half way in, with his legs slotting through the railings and dangling off into the air.

Matty absolutely did not know what George could possibly mean. Nor did he exactly trust him. But still, light truly burned in his eyes, and the warmth of fire could only ever draw him closer.

“See!” George exclaimed, far too smug for Matty’s liking. “You’re  _ fine _ .” He grinned across at the beautiful, curly haired boy who’d sat down beside him.

Matty’s stomach was leaping in his chest: performing a routine of only somersaults. He looked down and made quick work of convincing himself that it was indeed just the height. Just the stupid idea itself and not the boy who’d suggested it.

“Yeah…” Matty’s voice was frail, feeble at best, with eyes determined to tear him apart: forever fixated upon the ground. “I’m fine.” He continued: clinging to the hope that if he said it enough, he just might begin to believe it.

George watched him for a moment: soft curls billowing in the breeze, eyes boring down into the water below, leaving just a trace of blue to flash through darkened irises, just for a second. 

He was all drawn in. Matty had gathered up everything he had and stuffed it inside of his chest. A defence mechanism. A safety precaution. He didn’t trust George to be there. To catch him. That hurt, like fingerprint shaped bruises - it stung.

“So… my bad day…” George dragged weary feet down the path of revelation, as if their afternoon might be about building bridges and not just breaking them.

“Yeah…” Matty looked up, tearing his eyes away from the water below for the very first time. In its place, he held George’s eyes, and instead his gaze traced the ripples of a smile.

“My friend’s pissed with me. No, I think, maybe all of them are. Just to different levels.” George drew out a sigh, kicking his feet out into thin air. Matty watched him: concerned, but unashamed.

“Why?” Matty couldn’t help but inquire; he was, however unsure as to just when he had really begun to  _ care _ .

George shook his head: despondent, desperate to shy away from the truth. “Doesn’t matter-”

“I told you my problems. Tell me yours.” Matty continued, somehow convinced that George owed him that right. That George, this tall, mad, unpredictable boy, with the weed and the leather jackets, owed him anything at all. 

Up in Matty’s head, he did. Up in Matty’s head, he cared. Yet up in Matty’s head, still, he lied. For perfection was the kind of illusion so grand that even Matty’s imagination couldn’t sustain.

“You told me about your girlfriend who you hate.” George muttered, like it was nothing at all. Matty wished it wasn’t. Matty wished George would lie to him properly. “That’s nothing. That’s… you’re…” He took Matty in once more. “You’re sixteen and you’re worried about your  _ girlfriend _ and-”

“And you’re eighteen and you think you’re worlds away from me because your friends hate you.” Matty interjected, not taking kindly to George’s tone, or to patronisation in general.

“They don’t  _ hate _ me.” George argued, face turned away. “They’re just…  _ pissed _ . And it’s… it’s the situation, you see. It’s not the kind of thing I can just easily solve. Like your shit is.”

“It’s not.” Matty shook his head, agitation searing through his veins. Still, he didn’t look at George with anything lesser.

“Break up with her. If you hate her. Break up with her. That’s not happiness, that’s not good for you. That’s bullshit.” George drew it out like common sense, and perhaps, even if just beyond Matty’s understanding, it was. “If you don’t like her at all. It’s bad for the both of you. And trying to force anything out of that - that’s even  _ worse _ .”

Matty shook his head. “I think I could love her… deep down.”

“Could isn’t the same as can.” George bit down onto his bottom lip. “Listen, I’ve known girls like that. Where we  _ could _ fall in love, but we just can’t. Whatever reason - things aren’t going to work like that.”

“And what ended up happening?” Matty pushed aside any kind of courtesy for the sake his own curiosity.

George gave a shrug. “We use each other. It’s unhealthy. We fuck but we fight and that’s it. And we could have been friends properly, if it wasn’t for that. And it hurts, because there’s always that part of you that thinks you could love her - the part that’s fucked, the part that thinks of drugs and the way she kisses drunk, and the way she looks when you fuck. Like she’s at bliss. Like this is  _ everything _ . And then you really think that you  _ could _ be in your love. But you’re not. Because give it a day or two, fuck, maybe even give it an hour, and she’ll be snogging all your mates. And you’ll be stood there - bitter and sober. And it hurts.”

Words evaded Matty: George’s ran through his head instead. It seemed odd - the notion of imagining Charlotte like that. It didn’t quite fit.

And Matty wondered if he just couldn’t love her at all. Maybe he just wished he might.

“You’ve got shit mates if they’d kiss your girlfriend.” With his comfort zone desperately receding, Matty found the only words he could; he couldn’t imagine neither Adam nor Ross ever kissing Charlotte, no matter how drunk they got, no matter how fucked things got.

George gave a snort. “She’s not my girlfriend. And they’re not good mates. Some of them, maybe. It’s complicated. You wouldn’t understand.”

Matty wasn’t at all inclined to believe him. “Try me.”

George shook his head. “I don’t myself.” 

He felt Matty move closer to him. The trees began to sway apart, leaving sunlight to pool down upon them from heavens above. He looked beautiful like that. In the golden sun: face catching the light. He looked angelic even, ethereal. The kind of boy George ought to have run from. Yet here they were, despite every odd upon heaven and earth.

“It’s the weed.” George gave in, after all. “There was a thing last night. And they were pissed I didn’t have the drugs, and I was a dick to someone else, and…” He retrieved the bag of weed from his pocket. “It was shit. You ever been the only sober person in a crowd of people off their fucking heads?”

Matty couldn’t say he had, and George could see through any sort of pretense.

“Okay, maybe one day you’ll know what I mean, but…” He drew out a sigh. “It’s not your fault, I know you had the drugs but-”

“You made me take them.” Matty snapped, eyes bearing weight against George’s spine. “Like fuck is it my fault that your mates are pissed with you.”

George couldn’t help but grin: admiring the spark in Matty’s eyes. “Course it’s not. I got myself into this shit. Look… that’s what I’m saying. I don’t want to get you into it too.”

“Too late, isn’t it?” Matty snatched the weed from George’s fingers. “I’ve already smoked the half of it, haven’t I?”

George shrugged. “I’m not going to tell them that yeah, this poor, skinny, little sixteen year old from the bookshop took their drugs.”

Matty watched him for a moment: forever unable to figure this George out.

“I’m taking the blame. It’s my fault. I let you. I invited you out here to smoke it.” George reached into his pocket for papers, steadily rolling them a second joint.

“So it’s not…  _ your _ weed?” Matty eyed him almost dubiously.

George gave a shrug. “It’s complicated.”

“Oh fuck off.” His words were bitter, as if spiked with every retort he’d ever kept inside. “How complicated can it be? So? It’s your mate’s? Or something? You stole it… or?”

“It’s  _ technically _ Jesse’s. It’s mine in the sense that I’ve got the right to smoke it and carry it around. It’s just not really mine to give to you. I’m not supposed to do that.” Yet, George watched, calm and placid, as Matty lit up the joint.

He snorted, inhaling with desperation. A kind of sense of inhibition. Lost out in the moment. Limbo. Ready to fall from the bridge and drown if fate so bade it. 

“But I am.” George finished, taking the joint from Matty’s, stupidly dainty, fingertips. “I don’t really know why.” He confessed, letting the smoke fill his lungs, drowning out last drop of common sense he had left.

“It’s okay. He’s not going to be pissed at me forever. Someone’s going to talk him round. Chelsea will do it in the end, when she starts to feel sorry for me, and wakes up on a day when she decides she loves me for all of ten minutes.”

Matty watched George. Words soft. Tentative. Spoken like whispers to the breeze. Forgotten to the world. Raindrops. The pitter-patter. Rolling down window panes. One raindrop in a thunderstorm. Forgotten, but not to Matty. He watched George like it was all he could do.

“I don’t love her though.” George continued, self-deprecating smile clinging to his lips. “Used to. I guess I could again. But I’m not going to. I won’t. She’s pretty but she’s not beautiful.”

“Chelsea…” Matty drew out a sigh, physically feeling the weight of George’s words unravelling in his chest.

“Yeah. She knows. That I don’t love her. And that I know she doesn’t love me. I don’t know. Sometimes maybe we just get high and like to pretend. Sometimes you just need to have sex, I mean. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t understand her. At  _ all _ .”

There was no doubt that it was  _ something _ : admitting that. As after all, he’d been right - it was complicated.

“I’m never going to love Charlotte.” Matty drew out a sigh. “Never even really like her.”

“Break up with her.” George told him, hopeful for once that it might sink in.

“I would.” He shook his head. “But I can’t.”

“Why not?” George took a drag, drawing out their situation into simple lines and shapes, pulling them into a world they could understand. He’d assumed Matty was all big words and complicated states, but still, it was evident they were both very much out of place.

“Because…” He snatched the joint back, exhaling deeply, as if it might solve his every problem. “They’ll call me queer again. The boys at school. And I’m  _ scared _ .”

George’s fingers fumbled around the joint, his whole body shuddering as he took it back. Yet with a steady exhale, his eyes fixed upon Matty, and his response was calm, maybe even feigning composed. “It’s just a word. Why should you be scared of a  _ word _ ?”

“I’m not scared of the word. Just what it means.” Matty explained, drawing his gaze back down to the river, momentarily even hoping to drown.

“ _ Why _ ?” George grew tired; he’d seen the very same boy a hundred times before. It was obvious now - sickeningly so. He wanted to get off this bridge, out of the forest, he wanted to go home.

“Because I’m not.” Matty was dumbfounded, uncomfortable; he’d never really imagined that George might have demanded an explanation.

“You’re not a woman. Are you scared of all women?” George shook his head. “Doesn’t make sense, Matty.”

“It does, I just-...” He drew out a sigh. “You’ve got me wrong. I just don’t want people to  _ think _ I am. Yeah, that. That’s what I’m scared of, you see. Not the  _ word _ , just… connotations. What it means. What people  _ think _ -”

“Then go get yourself another fucking girlfriend then.” George snapped, words abrasive, cutting deep into Matty’s skin with each reverberation as they echoed through the trees.

Matty swallowed. Hard. Eyes wide. Pleading. He didn’t know George - at all.

“Go up to any fucking girl you see. Half-way pretty. Doesn’t fucking matter, does it? Tell Charlotte you think she’s a bitch, tell her you think she’s ugly, you think she’s a slag - whatever. Have the heart to be fucking honest. Then walk right up to the next girl you see and give her a quick snog - make sure everyone sees you as you drag her behind the bushes to get your hands down her pants. There you fucking  _ go _ . Simple. I told you. You’re sixteen. You’re stupid. Problem solved.”

Matty blinked up at George: dumbfounded.

“I…”

George didn’t let him finish, instead stumbled to his feet, throwing the joint and the remaining weed over the railings and into the river. “Whatever.”

Matty watched them fall. Watched them fizzle. And watched them sink.

Once the water stilled, and the ripples faded, George was gone.

The forest was silent. As if there’d been no evidence of his presence at all. Yet, despite the confusion that surrounded him, the truth was simple; Matty had fucked up. He always did.

-


	3. "maybe you should face your fears."

He kissed her in the street because he could.

It was too late. Too dark. He was too high. Too taken away with the look in her eyes. He might even have told himself it was something. Worse still, he might even have believed it.

It was a disgusting early morning affair, with fingers entwined and lips ghosting over cheeks. He wanted to go back. To put his head back into place atop his neck. But she had him now; his head in her hands.

And he let her. With eyes wide. Imploring. Willing. He let her. He whispered a prayer up to the silent, inky black heavens, and let her.

For it was either to make a mess or to make nothing at all. And if George were to die that night, he was sure the reddening marks, sucked into his neck, would serve as a suitable epitaph.

Her arms reached up, tugging at his neck, locking their bodies together; if George had wanted escape, it no longer posed itself as an option. Yet he was content, oddly so - under the moonlight, caught by a slow, drugged look in a pretty girl’s eyes. It was an easy night if he let it be. If he turned off his mind for a while. And George reckoned he could do that.

“Where are your friends?” Her voice was soft, different somehow: carrying an accent that George would have perhaps recognised sober. 

“Mmm…” George drew his features out into a frown, pushing his head onto her shoulder and staring out into the darkness. 

They were alone. He hadn’t thought about that. He’d never spared a thought for who they’d been, and instead fixed his head on who they were: each individual moment. It was fun to live like that, but it was always soon to catch up to him - consequence always in tow.

“Have they gone home?” She filled the silence, words rolling easily over her tongue. George thought they might have comforted him if he could have believed the glassy look in her eyes: concern. She didn’t care. Not really. She was just here. Like a ghost among men; he’d take her hand for the night, but nothing more. 

“What friends?” George slurred, struggling to recall the evening at all. As far as he was concerned they were hardly on good terms with him. Chelsea, perhaps, would have given him the benefit of a night, of a conversation, of a high, but he didn’t see her leaving him to another girl.

“What friends?” She mimicked, smile curling over her lips. “Exactly…” With swift movements her lips were back on his again and George let himself be subdued. He let the world ebb and fade away, for he dreamed of a tomorrow in which he didn’t have to wonder why.

She tasted like the night itself: the inky blackness of stars, the bittersweet mellow light of the moon, the sharp, sparkling bite of the stars. He dug his teeth into her lip: tearing his own hole in the universe - somewhere to curl up inside and live forever - yet another makeshift home.

She laughed against him. He held her still. They shared thoughts. Silent. Unwilling. For on the night that the sky met the ground, the world fell to its knees.

George put his tongue in her mouth and closed his eyes.

He couldn’t remember her name but it didn’t matter at all.

He could hardly recall himself; he was no longer someone, he was no longer tied down. He was just  _ George _ . Out in the street, kissing a pretty girl, with his tongue in her mouth.

And he reckoned he could deal with that; it was easy.  _ Almost _ .

“Come on.” She told him, voice melodical, fingers curling around his own. He let the night unravel around them, for she parted the darkness like the tide underfoot.

But the porch light was so bright. And she faded away soon. Somber and still, the night crumbled around them. Pretty girl mirrored the rest of the world under bright light; she smiled across at him with crooked teeth and a redness to her cheeks.

He let her take him inside anyway. It wasn’t his house - he was at least sure of that. Still, he never felt unwelcome, he never felt out of place. For maybe she wasn’t beautiful, maybe she wasn’t the moon herself in human form, but maybe she was something else.

With closed doors, and warmth rising like fires inside their chests - artificial flames - he set his mind to wonder. He set his eyes to the ceiling and felt fingers around his wrists: cold even in the warmth.

His gaze steadied to watch her. To watch the room change, to watch the darkness envelope them once more, for her body shimmered and shone like she was one of the stars. Like George had yanked her down from heaven that night; he stared at her unwilling, and wondered if he ought to put her back.

Still he wished. Still he stared: transfixed. For she was beautiful again, and George grasped the illusion like it was all he had.

He fucked her that night. Because he could.

Because she was pretty. Because she let him. Because for a few, precious moments, he’d thought he was in love.

George lay awake that night: everything he’d once hated.

The night dragged on for days, but the warmth beside him remained constant, remained consuming - something he could cling to through the darkness, through gails dragging his every thought from his head and out the window. He missed his head, but he’d never say that he wanted it back.

Still, through it all, he kept his eyes shut. He kept his eyes shut and dreamt of the sun. He dreamt of its warmth: of something real, anything that meant something at all. Desperate for the world that had long eluded him, George went to sleep and dreamed that he was not himself.

But the morning was cold.

A cold he could not escape, with eyes fluttering open, and a steady morning light flooding into the bedroom.

It was a house he didn’t know. A world unfamiliar, surrounded by footsteps he’d never taken. George sat up in bed and pulled his arms across his chest.

Although the bed was empty beside him, he knew it to be a lie - for he saw the crinkling of the sheets, and the dip in the mattress, and memories slashed across his mind, like shards of broken glass - all that remained of last night’s mirror, of the self he’d once seen opposite him.

He dared not move. He was content instead to lie there forever. To let days pass him by, to even elude the midday sun he’d once craved. For suddenly, in the day, in his bitter sober head, nothing meant anything at all.

He missed his friends. He wanted Jesse to slap him across the face if he so deserved it, for he certainly didn’t doubt that he did. George lay still for a moment more and let the world creep back into his head. Fuck love, fuck the drugs, fuck everything else. George missed the dust on the walls, forever cans of soup, and cracks in those walls - those marks that they shared.

He dared not face anyone else. Not even Chelsea, as much as she’d plead and beg, insistent that she cared still, for he wasn’t sure if he trusted her anymore. He pulled his head back to days before, to what he’d said, to what he’d confessed. 

George delved into the words that had escaped him; George stumbled at the notion of the prettiest boy. Still, he wasn’t beautiful, but George owed himself the truth.

But Matty wasn’t real. Not anymore. George assured himself of that.

He wasn’t real for him, at least. He wasn’t there; he wasn’t there for him to love. He was distant now - nothing more than a memory.

George hoped at least that he was happy. And that he ended it with that girl - the one he didn’t love, for no one deserved that, no matter what they’d done. No matter how many cracks they’d left, no matter how many scars they’d made, no matter how deep a hole they’d dug.

But George didn’t miss him; he wouldn’t allow it.

He let out a groan and watched the dust settle around him; he lay in that bed and felt himself grow old. Until, a spell seemed to break, and the silence crumbled despite ovation, and fell swiftly to its knees.

“Hey George…” It was that voice. All over again. Distant with more than a door between them. He didn’t miss her, but instead how she’d felt last night.

George closed his eyes and didn’t say a word. For feigning sleep seemed the easiest option this time. And George was not the hero the world had thought him to be.

“I don’t know if you’re awake, but…” She continued: relentless as ever. He hated her in the morning light. “I’ve made you breakfast. It’s downstairs. It’s getting cold. But I don’t know if I should wake you… I don’t… know…”

George blinked his eyes open wide: dreading that her hand might find the doorknob, and that her eyes might find his own, and that she might convince him to stay, and that might he fall in love with her for another night. He couldn’t let that happen.

“I’m awake…” His voice was hushed, heart thudding from inside his chest.

“Morning.” He could feel her smile. He could feel so much love, but he’d seen it all before; he rejected it still, he pushed her away, and hoped for a day anew.

“Yeah… I’m… give me a minute.” He stretched his arms up into the air and stumbled out of bed. Listening for her footsteps growing softer, the stairs creaking as she faded away into the distance, George’s lips ignited with a smile. Perhaps there was hope, after all.

Still, he couldn’t quite recall her name. He told himself it didn’t matter, and faced his reflection in the mirror as he picked last night’s clothes up off the floor and pulled them on as quickly as he could manage.

He looked a mess. There was no denying that. He wanted to get out of his head just as much as he wanted to get out of the house. Out of his head as much as hers. But she was lucky; she’d forget him soon, but this night, these days, would plague George for time immeasurable.

With one fleeting glance back towards the bedroom door, George uttered a silent apology, and left one more person behind with a push: opening up her bedroom window. He didn’t hesitate before dangling his legs out, so very careful  _ not _ to look down, not to give into himself, to those most intimately innate desires, as his legs found the drainpipe a little way from the window.

It was then, with fresh morning air in his lungs, that George’s fingers slipped from the windowsill and his body clung to the drainpipe, hands hitting the wall -  _ hard _ . He let the impact flow through him before he put his muscles back into motion and made his way down the building, stumbling a little, but eventually landing firmly on his feet in the small side street between two houses - her’s and next door’s. 

George gave one look back up to the bedroom window, to the world he’d once known, and whispered a feeble goodbye, before disappearing off through the streets, to fix the morning the very best he could.

He spared not one thought for the girl sat in her kitchen, forever waiting, for the minute eternal, for the breakfast she’d made him, growing cold in the morning air. It was easier that way, it seemed.

George found himself from one doorstep to another within no more than ten minutes. It was this house, however, that seemed to bear the weight of the world, for behind that old, paint-chipped, front door, lay someone that did indeed matter.

Minutes dragged on for hours, for time infinite, as George stood there, letting the sun ascend the pale blue skies, letting the world tick on by. But time was never infinite, nothing was ever truly indefinite, and it was only a matter of time until George’s fingers moved of their own accord and turned his key in the front door.

The world slowed as the door swung open; hesitant, George let his feet lead him inside. Each footstep seemed to resonate with the force of an earthquake, but still George felt like he was floating - walking on nothing at all.

Eyes scanned the skinny hallway before him, tracing familiar cracks, scuff in comfortingly hideous wallpaper. He knew this house. He knew this home. Even as it was never quite his, his key fit the lock, and his fingertips could trace cracks on the walls with his eyes closed. If this wasn’t home, it was as close as he was going to get.

And the silence parted slow. Dark eyes held his own from the doorway. The empty door frame to the kitchen. For a friend had torn the door off two months prior - bad trip, nothing more; the kitchen didn’t necessarily  _ need _ a door.

Almost instinctively, his fingertips moved to trace the empty hinges. George watched him, praying momentarily that the reddening skin of his fingers would attract each and every splinter. He wanted him to hurt. To hurt like he had too. But the house was silent, still - they were safe here, at least.

“Took your time coming home.” His voice was unusually low, almost gravelly - out of place; George wondered if he knew him sometimes.

His eyes watched him: hawkishly. George let them seek, let him take what he sought. For they were just people, these were just words, and what could words do beside vibrate against bone. George wasn’t scared. Not anymore.

“Yeah.” He didn’t evade the truth, pulling himself upright, for he was a great deal taller than him, if ever it did show. “There was a girl.”

Stale air erupted with laughter; George watched as his eyes lit up, catching the sunlight from the kitchen windows - wide open, aiding escape to residual ashtray smoke. Sometimes, George saw a man he knew in those eyes, in the lines of that face, in the voice speaking softly at night.

“Is she the  _ one _ , then?” His tone was teasing, mocking, as if to suddenly regard George as the close friend he was, and not the stranger he’d put him up to be. For as much as George did care for him, he could never claim to understand him, for his mind didn’t tick nor unravel, it bubbled and ebbed and cried.

“No.” George told him rather firmly, pushing past him and into the kitchen. As much as he’d denied the pretty girl’s offer of breakfast, he was still hungry.

“What was wrong then? Tits not big enough for you?” He was in too much of a good mood for the morning; George couldn’t help but doubt him. The two stared each other down with long dubious eyes for a moment more, letting the silence grow stale around them.

“Alright yeah, whatever.” George finally snapped, putting a slice of bread into the toaster. “You want some, Jesse?” He turned back to face him, watching as the absent face of his friend turned to the ground with a soft shake of his head.

“No, but seriously…” He trailed off, watching George intently as he fumbled around the kitchen in search of a rather makeshift breakfast. “What was wrong with her? Chelsea said you were all over her last night? Or was it a different girl…?” His laughter was too bubbly, malleable almost, as if he’d shaped it himself.

“I don’t know.” George drew out a bitterly honest sigh, waiting forever for the toaster to pop. “I was fucking…  _ off my head _ . I don’t remember shit. There was this girl, and in like the middle of the night, I thought she was the moon, stars, fucking everything in the sky, and she took me home, and we probably fucked, or something like that - I put my clothes on in the morning at least. But in the morning, she was  _ just _ … just a girl. And I climbed out the window before she could drag me downstairs and make me eat breakfast with her.”

“Out the window?” Jesse snorted. “Classy, George, classy.”

“Yeah, whatever.” George shrugged it off, hastily buttering a slice of toast - struggling with a lump of butter that was both too hard and too soft at the same time; nothing in Jesse’s house was ever quite right, after all.

“Suppose Chelsea would say so.” Jesse took the liberty of perching himself on the end of the kitchen table, legs dangling down and feet scraping against the tiled floor. “I mean. She’s… I don’t know what your deal is, but she’s… I mean, other week I swear she just fucked me to get back at you.”

“And you fucked her, still?” George held Jesse’s gaze, feigning surprise. 

“Yeah.” He bit back a smirk. “Course. Gotta keep you on your toes and all that.”

George leant back against the fridge, plate of toast in hand. “Keep her, mate. I’m not fussed. I’m done with her. We’re friends yeah, but I don’t… have  _ feelings _ for her.”

“Sounds like a lot of bollocks, but alright.” Jesse concluded, honest as always. George didn’t bother arguing otherwise.

The air grew still, leaving Jesse to watch George eat his breakfast as he smoked his last cigarette down to a stump, dropping it slowly to the kitchen floor. George stared but he didn't say a word.

“It’s that  _ boy _ , isn’t it?” Jesse had watched George for what felt like forever before words escaped him. George trembled, eyes wide, watching that forever unreadable mind twist, and turn, and scheme.

“What?” George placed his empty plate onto the side, watching Jesse carefully.

“That boy. What’s his name?” Jesse continued: over-confident as always.

“I don’t know.” George continued, lost amidst the messy tracks of Jesse’s mind. “What  _ is _ his name?”

Jesse laughed, rolling his eyes. “Oh fuck off, George. You know the one. Chels’ been on about him. You moped to her. Think she’s jealous. Shame you’re not interested. Think  _ she is _ .”

George shook his head. “She’s not, Jess. She’s playing you too. She’s lovely, but god, she does just want to sleep with everyone.”

Jesse gave a shrug. “Can you blame her? She’s got her life sorted out. Smile at some poor guy, flash her tits and she’s got whatever she desires. I mean, she’s pretty. Can you blame us for falling for it?”

George decided that he didn’t want to sum his friendship with Chelsea into the same regards that Jesse had; stupid as he might be, he still something else - after all, girls weren’t all just tits and lies.

“Anyway…” Jesse continued, his eyes pinning George back to the fridge door. “This boy. You know who I’m on about. Don’t play dumb. It’s him, isn’t it?”

George slowed, picking at his fingernails, letting his eyes cascade to the floor. Desperate as he tried, those same curls were forever destined to cross his mind, forever he watched the same smile, eyes dark, set apart only by flecks of gold: the very beginning of a sunrise.

“His name’s Matty.” George drew out a sigh, throwing his head back, eyes up to a familiar ceiling: cracked, rotten, decaying. “And he’s straight.” 

Jesse remained silent for a moment too long: it almost seemed as if he cared. The illusion was something George sought to dissolve himself into - to close his eyes and never return from. He wanted this to mean, something, anything. He missed the boy, with the smiles, and the curls, and the truly fascinating mind.

“Do you mean ‘straight’ or  _ straight _ ?” Jesse got to his feet, crossing the kitchen to fumble through the drawers, setting aside knives and forks for the tin of weed stashed at the very back.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” George watched him: only half-way convinced of anything he had to say. Still, he was careful not to upset him, especially as he opened the tin of weed, rolling out a joint on the kitchen counter.

“Is he…  _ heterosexual _ , or is he straight because he’s young and scared and society is narrow-minded and he’s never seen anyone else’s cock before?” Jesse’s nonchalance held up as something to be reckoned with.

George remained silent: head lost somewhere away from the kitchen, from the knowing looks in familiar eyes. He wanted out. He wanted calm. He wanted cool autumn air. But he stared out the kitchen window and watched the flowers blossom in the spring.

Vacant eyes well noted, Jesse held common decency up high, and passed the joint into George’s hand. Not a word was said of the gesture, but the looks were long, hard, and slow; their relationship was a difficult one.

“I don’t know.” George concluded in all honesty, lighting up the joint and drawing his worries out in thin wisps of smoke.

“Then it’s probably the latter one.” Jesse finished for him, rolling himself up another joint. “Does he look like a twink, or what?”

George’s eyes widened - a little taken aback. “No one  _ looks _ like a twink- that’s-”

“George… you  _ know _ what I mean… it’s nine in the morning, I’m not going to think of a better way to put it.” Jesse pushed himself up onto the countertop, wrenching the window open further as he began to inhale.

“I don’t know...” George trailed off. “A bit. Kinda. He’s not  _ flamboyant _ . But he’s small and skinny, and he wears jumpers and I think his cheeks are always pink. He’s cute. Like actually.”

Jesse thought for a moment. “Let me meet him.”

Somehow, George wasn’t entirely convinced. “Yeah, maybe not.”

“What? I’m nice, me. Fucking hell, George, I mean… what am I gonna do? Not like-”

“I don’t know, Jesse, I don’t  _ know _ .” George drew out a sigh. “I think… things are a bit fucked now maybe. I was kind of… a dick to him.”

“Well done.” Jesse rolled his eyes, smirk twitching at his lips as George shot him the finger in response. “Why, though? If he’s so  _ sweet _ and  _ perfect _ and-”

“Shut up.” He shook his head, taking a moment or two just to smoke, just to  _ think _ . “He has this girlfriend who he hates. So I told him to break up with her, and he keeps saying no - that he can’t do that, so I ask why. And it’s because he doesn’t want anyone to think he’s  _ queer _ . Because he’s ‘scared’ of the word… and what it fucking means.”

Jesse snorted. “Let me meet him - I’ll show him something to be scared of, sort him out-”

“No, Jess,  _ no _ .” George shook his head, burying his head in the palm of his hand. “Let him be, alright? I don’t think it’s his fault, I just… I don’t know.”

“I mean you made it pretty obvious you’re a big old fucking queer, yourself, didn’t you?” Jesse couldn’t help but grin. “So, try and make it up to him. Long as he’s alright with you, seems as if he’s had a think, maybe changed his mind about things.”

George shook his head. “It’s not worth it. I can’t be bothered. He’s just a  _ boy _ .” He repeated in a desperate attempt to convince himself as such. “I just need something else. To take my mind off him.”

“Well…” Jesse drew out a smile, getting to his feet. “I’ve got you covered.”

George raised his eyebrows. “A job?”

“Yeah.” Jesse snorted. “Alright, don’t shit yourself - nothing big. Few pills, that’s all. You’re gonna be fine, long as you’re not a fucking idiot.” He reached into the back of the kitchen drawers and placed a small plastic bag of pills into George’s palm.

“Yeah…” George drew out a sigh, staring down at them for a little too long.

“It’s what happened with Cam, isn’t it-”

“No, Jess, I don’t- I don’t wanna…” He shook his head, finishing his joint and stubbing it out into the ashtray. “Point is to get my fucking mind off it, isn’t it? So shut up, mate.” 

George stared down at the pills, before finally shoving them into his jacket pocket. “Where are these going then?”

Jesse lit up with a smile.

-

Perhaps it was guilt in the end. That took him there. Feet moving of their own accord.

It had been a slow morning but a slower afternoon. George wished it all behind him, and still he clung to the warmth of the night. He spent minutes, he spent hours, wishing for a face that would look the same in the morning light.

Amongst everything, George had a strange relationship with his own heart. Then again, guilt was forever a funny thing. Funnier still for a boy with a whole world to hold onto, but nothing ever managing to drag him down - that was the trick you see - your feet couldn’t sink into the ground, the earth couldn’t pull you under as long as you kept moving forever.

That had been George’s plan. Not that he’d had much of one in the first place. Everything was always very circumstantial, and every decision was not a decision made sober. Still, George had the ludicrosity to trust his own whim.

But it had been empty houses, stuffed up lungs, and forever stares, different girls, driving in somebody else’s car, and then  _ this _ . It was too permanent. But it was okay. It was home. The kind of home George had sought to run from.

He wondered why he stayed. As he watched the sky and tucked his thoughts up in clouds of smoke: sent like curses up to the skies. He could just run, after all. It could be his last day, his very last afternoon. His last deal. Their last conversation - hardly much of a goodbye. A grotty kitchen, joints, a slice of toast.

George sometimes thought he liked Jesse. But he knew that wasn’t it. Because he was sober sometimes. And truthfully, George didn’t like any of his friends very much when he wasn’t on drugs. But really, in that state, George didn’t like himself very much either.

It was the drugs.

He should have taken the pills and run. He should have said goodbye to shitty towns, and complicated girls, and a whole winding world of friends that drew impossibly fine lines. But nothing was ever easy. And really, Jesse bought those crisps he liked. Sometimes even with his own money too.

George made a promise to himself to bide those thoughts goodbye as he let nature surround him. Instead, he stood still, and focused on fresh spring air in the place of tar. He gave beauty its recognition, gave the moment what it deserved. He felt safe, but home was beyond him.

Tracing fingertips against tree trunks as he walked, a winding path down a dirt trail, nature stretching out as far as the eye could see, George let himself get lost. He could feel the high dissipating; sober was grim, sober was cold, sober hurt, sober spoke too many truths, and still George clung to lies.

Still, in the middle of the woods, George looked up at the skies and imagined a world in which he didn’t have to pretend to be brave. But he looked himself down, and under all these clothes - under Jesse’s jacket, and second-hand jeans, he couldn’t find himself anymore. He smelt like pot, but felt like nothing at all. And burning, scalding, like an imprint, lay a stranger’s hand on his thigh.

He thought of the pretty girl, who’d once belonged up in the night sky. He hoped, at least, he hadn’t made her cry.

Then fate tugged. From one end of the great rope that was life. 

George had spent years playing tug of war, but that day, he relented; he drew himself inside his chest, and let the world yank and pull whatever good it could find out of him.

Fate played a bitter hand. It fit well on George’s forlorn eyes: blinking up slowly as the trees cleared and the afternoon made itself apparent in more than golden rays of sunlight.

He swallowed hard and tried to turn away. Yet for every door that George slammed shut, fate opened a dozen more; he played a hard game, but the world would always prevail.

Frozen, he couldn’t deny that the moment was finite, and through dark eyelashes, he caught a cold, kind of direct sunlight. For before him, skin pale, curled up into a ball, sat the winter sun - forever hiding his face. He’d missed that warmth, for it was scarce and distrusting, but still, it didn’t taste the same as it had in summer.

This wasn’t a game that George could play. This was a boy that George knew better than most, but still, knew nothing about at all, for his mind wound itself around him like vines, and George stood like a ship capsized - fate finally caught up to him, and he felt his feet sinking into the ground.

But George was not the one that slipped. George was not the one that began to fall.

It was a lurch: eyes blown wide, realisation hitting like a bomb, and with the impact, with incredible, fervent force, a skinny body snapped in half, with only time for dainty little frozen-bitten fingertips to curl around rusty rail.

George watched, eyes wide, as this beautiful boy - the one who he’d watched as the sun, felt right out of the sky.

His face grew red, knuckles white, panic in his eyes: struggling to pull his other hand up to the railings, for he struggled there, dangling up in the air - like a puppet, like a prize, somehow so far up above the water below.

George watched him and time came to a slow.

This time fate seemed exempt, or at least it sat back and took the front row seat, leaving panic to run like fire through George’s veins: setting off momentary flames like sparks. For in that collapsing, forever moment, the walls of reality seemed like that of a house destined to fall. 

He made quick work of the distance, despite the sudden weight to his feet, dragging them through the air as if his boots were leaden, as if to the leather back of his jacket, were a thousand tiny hands clamped, and tugging: dragging George back beyond, into the darkness nothingness beyond the trees.

Yet once all seemed to prevail, his destination served no solution, as in the chokehold of the afternoon air, George stood, eyes wide, up at the boy - panicked and struggling with even the air in his chest.

With arms extending upwards, the moment snapped. Still, with the wind and water rushing through his ears, the world real again, thinking in real time, George couldn’t quite reach him.

There was a world in which he had. There was a world in which they were safe. There was a world in which this was easy. But that was a world in which George had stayed. The world in which they were happy, the world in which things were easy, was the one in which they had not met at all.

Still, it was George’s due to pick up the pieces.

He stared up at the boy, looking younger now than ever. He called it his own fault, for that was what it was. But swallowed hard, put himself together, and tried to act the two years older he was.

“I’ll catch you.” George’s voice was too calm to seem real; he distrusted even his own lips, still he was grateful that at least one cell in his body seemed to be certain of what he was doing.

Mistakes were made by the multitude that afternoon, but the pinnacle of it all was Matty looking down. Air itself eluded him, knuckles growing whiter too, as fingers came close to slipping entirely.

“Trust me. I’ll catch you.” George held his gaze, desperate to soften the panic in those impossibly dark eyes, frozen over with fear beyond his comprehension.

“Trust you?” Matty laughed: feeble, body shuddering in mid air as he did so. “I-I… I don’t… think so.” His voice was a whisper: a forced struggle.

“Look at me, Matty, come on, it’s not like you can stay there forever.” George eased his lips up into a smile. It was a gesture that Matty did not care to mirror. “It’s not as far as it seems. I’ll catch you.”

“Fuck.” Matty inhaled as deeply as he could: fighting against lungs that worked as if to reject air entirely. 

There was a part of Matty that wanted to give up entirely, to die like that, hanging still there; George could see it. Yet there was a part of George, stronger, fiercer, that wouldn’t let that happen.

“I’ll catch you.” He repeated, louder this time, letting his words echo through the trees as if to serve some form of warning - to anyone, to anything out there that might have thought otherwise of him.

This was guilt. In a way. For Matty was beautiful, and George was not quite so cold-hearted as to base things entirely as such. But there was a world in which he had gone back for Cam, and that was a world in which he was not standing underneath that bridge.

Matty landed in George’s arms with a very definite thud. The world seemed to fall backwards itself with the impact, but George pulled his arms around Matty’s back and held him there tight, letting him press his face into his chest.

He steadied himself. He steadied the two of them there, letting Matty’s curls fan out across his chest. Still, with two feet on the ground, his body shook, and with fingers tracing patterns into Matty’s back, he was lost for what else to do.

For this was his fault. Forever. Still. For there was a world in which Matty was not okay. And that mattered. It mattered in the way Jesse would have laughed at, and for a moment George was back in that kitchen and everything seemed simple and maybe even nice. For that split-second, George remembered the comfort of the high.

But Matty pulled away. Just a little bit. With wide, startled doe eyes staring up at George’s own. He seemed impossibly smaller still, with gentle fingertips brought down to hang limp over George’s hips.

“You’re okay.” George told him - it felt like something he needed to hear.

Matty managed a smile, but nothing more.

George didn’t know what to say to a beautiful sixteen year old boy who looked very much on the verge of tears. He knew, however, how to light a cigarette, thus that had to do.

Matty closed those soft, wary eyes, and let dark eyelashes flutter onto reddening cheeks. If that was not trust, George did not know what it could be. 

Still, he struggled with the weight, with the truth to it all. He didn’t know this boy at all, and still, with arms held tightly around his back, he felt Matty’s blood beside his own in his veins. 

George dared to wonder if he could feel the same.

He received no answer, no clear conclusion, but Matty parted his lips slowly, and let George slot a cigarette between them, bringing a lighter up between them, and burning out their distance in a cloud of smoke.

It wasn’t until the air cleared that eyes, hazel as they caught the sunlight, flashed back at him, like screeching car headlights, raining sirens in his head, but still, his heartbeat slowed. For all they could do was breathe, and finally, that was easy.

“I’m sorry.” George uttered: lost for what else to say.

Matty’s eyes dilated as if truly looking at him for the first time. Still, he couldn’t figure George out. Not a single word slipped his lips: silence dragged on eternal, leaving them there, far too close, as if spellbound.

And then, the word seemed to snap, as if curling in over itself, and George’s hands began to tingle with the sudden realisation of just where they lay, as if it was Matty himself that was burning holes into George’s palms. Still, he held them there gently, he held Matty there, not with a soft courtesy but with everything he had.

“This is my fault.” He told him, words soft-spoken, like morning dew, settling slow, to fade away under the reign of the sun.

Matty didn’t say a word; he just watched him, eyes wide, unreadable, but poised as if to extract every bit of soul right out from George’s eyes.

“Course it was going to fucking-... and you shouldn’t- you shouldn’t have been here without me.” The possessive tone to George’s words was one that surprised them both.

He expected Matty to step back, to break everything that bound them together, practically stepping on each others’ toes, to stare at him with that wild look in his eyes. But Matty did nothing of the sort.

“What? Worried about me, were you?” As mocking as he intent was clear to be, the genuine curiosity in his words was unmissable. 

George drummed his thumbs against Matty’s back, pulling his hands up to cover his shoulder blades, but still, this was a conversation they had to have in words, as much as they’d never been George’s forte.

“Yeah.” Honesty served George poorly, but the situation seemed to look a little better. “Course, you were like…” He gestured back up to the bridge with his eyes. “ _ Falling _ .”

Matty scoffed. “I didn’t fall until you told me to let go.” His eyes remained on the bridge above: the light behind them flickering slightly.

“Yeah, well…” George flushed red, unsure of what to make of himself at all.

“I just slipped, you know…” Matty explained, speaking with his hands, still, as they rested up around George’s shoulders.

“I made you, though, didn’t I?” George reached one tentative hand away from Matty’s back and stretched it up to relieve his lips from the cigarette. Their cigarette, perhaps, as George put it to his lips and for that moment bade it as his own.

“Nah.” Matty shook his head, almost playfully. “I made myself slip, I was just… surprised to see you.”

“Surprised to see me?” George gave way to a genuine laughter. “In  _ my _ place-”

“Your place?” Matty’s eyes widened, glancing around at the trees.

“Yeah…” He admitted, vermillion cheeks in tow. “This is like…  _ where I go _ … when I need… to think, I guess.”

“You took me here, though.” Matty’s words were placid, mind unreadable, with eyes staring up into George’s. 

“I did.” George gave a nod, desperate to escape the unwilling pressure of Matty’s gaze.

“I don’t think I deserved that… if this is  _ your _ place, and…” He threw his eyes frantically around him, hands slipping from George’s back. “I don’t want to… I don’t want to…  _ interrupt _ , to… get in the way of your life, I don’t know… get  _ involved _ with you…” He took a breath: deep and baited. “If you don’t want me to.”

George had this boy hook, line, and sinker, and still, here he was drifting away. For, despite himself, George let him. It was easy, it had always been, as long as it was all pretend.

“It’s fine.” George assured him, rubbing his hands over Matty’s shoulderblades. “You’re fine. And… and… I’m sorry, for… whatever that was before.”

“No…” Matty shook his head, cheeks searing as he finally tore away. Eyes thrown to the ground, feet sinking into the mud, the truth finally made itself known. “I was… I don’t know…  _ ignorant _ , yeah?” He stole one fleeting glance up in George’s direction. 

“Yeah.” George had to agree, taking a step back himself - the situation seemed to command it. “I mean, the word ‘queer’ itself makes no sense to be scared of, but people who are going to give you shit for it, because they think you are, whatever… that’s yeah, something you can’t help fearing.”

“I’m not fucking  _ scared _ of them.” Matty retorted: eyes wide, suddenly ablaze, meeting George with more courage than either of them had expected.

“You don’t show it.” George was honest: heart strewn apart by the distance, taking a drag of his cigarette - no longer theirs.

“I’m not sat here crying about them - I’ve not run here because of  _ them _ , I-”

“If you weren’t scared of them, you’d dump your girlfriend.” George told him, simply, calmly, taking a step closer. “But you’re not going to, because you’re scared of what they’ll say, and that’s okay. But you have to know that’s going to make you unhappy.” 

Matty remained silent, head hung low.

George crossed the distance between them, cigarette extended out in a shaky hand. “Think about it. Is it worth it? Maybe you should face your fears.”

Words eluded them both, but still, Matty’s fingers curled in around the cigarette - shared once more. The air seemed to warm up a little; George closed his eyes and pretended there was such a thing as home, there were four familiar walls to count on, more than just old bedsheets, more than ashtrays on every windowsill.

“It’s my friends really.” Matty admitted, as if speaking more to the spring air, to the oak trees, than to the boy before him.

George didn’t force an explanation, instead he stood in silence as Matty slotted their cigarette back between George’s fingers.

“Why I came here. I needed to think. I needed to  _ breathe _ , and I- they’re like desperately worried about me. To the extent, that it’s just…  _ bullshit _ . Because I’m fine - I know I don’t look it, I know I could have died like ten minutes ago, but I’m  _ fine _ , I’m just-...” 

“Just what?” George dared to prompt him.

Matty spoke with his hands: extended, tentative, waiting.

Gaze distant, tracing patterns in the mud underfoot, silence reigned above all.

“Scared.” 

Eyes leapt to meet George’s eyes, wide beyond belief.

“Of what?” George prompted, overtaken with concern: mind working in a way he failed to entirely comprehend.

“I think maybe of myself.” 

Matty drew out a sigh, taking a step backwards. “Like falling from a height you didn’t know existed.”

George watched him, carefully, disappearing off into the trees. Stupid, arrogant, infatuated, he followed him, quickening his pace to a run.

“And what does that mean?” George called out after him, curling his fingers in around Matty’s wrist, and pulling him to a halt amidst the trees.

He stared up at him with eyes wide, flecks of forest green, flecks of distant sunlight - a passive gold. “Like…” His eyes darted: desperately scanning George’s face for answers. “When and how we will die? Those questions, some things you don’t want answers to.”

George shrugged, smile creeping over his lips. “That’s subjective - I’d  _ love _ to know.”

“What?” Matty frowned. “When you’d die? But you’d just live your life, counting down days -  _ terrified _ , unable to stop it. That’s the thing, it’d be like a limbo, like you’re hanging there helplessly, and-”

“Funny thing is, my life already feels a bit like that.” George hid his secrets well with laughter, but despite his smile, Matty still regarded him with concern.

“George…” He drew out a sigh.

“No, look, it’d be… you’d have an end date. Say? Sixty. You knew you were gonna die at sixty. And I’m eighteen now, that’s forty two more years. Suddenly everything’s more finite, and maybe I wouldn’t just spend time sitting around and getting stoned - maybe I’d do something, maybe I’d make something of myself. And there’s the thing - what’s fear anymore? Jump right off that cliff and see how it goes - you’ve got another forty two more years anyway. I’d like that.”

Matty couldn’t deny that he’d never thought about it that way.

“You’d need that wouldn’t you? The definitive truth that those little fears you face, they’re really not going to kill you.” 

George laughed, stupid enough to convince himself that there was more to this boy before him, that maybe Jesse was right. He was forever over-confident, and it was forever all too late - laughing with joy until the very moment it all fell to pieces. 

It bore little concern in the moment, with wildfire eyes, and laughter that could echo for miles. But of course, he’d pay the price. He always did.

-


	4. "it just sort of happened."

The air was warm, and the world presented itself in technicolour. She looked beautiful out there, with her auburn hair trailing out behind her and glistening in the sunlight. Such beauty was surely to be desired.

But even in all the sun’s warm, even in the most perfect of summer illusions, Matty remained reserved, eyes to the floor, head firmly upon his shoulders. Perhaps it was better like that.

He wanted to watch her, to fall in love, to feel something, but the world just wouldn’t work like that. Instead, he fought with his mind and laboured with his worst thoughts, drawing each and every worry out like a spool of tape, yet still, none saw a single end.

Matty was only vaguely aware of the conversation that surrounded him; Ross and Adam’s somewhat menial discussion floated through the air around him, before drifting off on the breeze.  He was thankful, at least, that they knew he wasn’t listening, and they bothered not to push him for an explanation. Their worries did tire him endlessly, but it seemed as if they at least served their purpose from time to time.

It took all his will to force his attention onto Charlotte - smiling and laughing across the school yard. He put words like ‘beautiful’ into his own head and hoped for the best, for a world in which it was all easy, and his head was constructed of four simple walls to lean against, and not an incomprehensible maze - forever winding and twisting away.

Comfort settled in around him: the world’s biggest trick yet, as Matty began to cling to his lies, to the familiarity of them, to the safety in knowing that all he had to do was pretend. Yet forever, fate had another trick up its sleeve, and before Matty could quite think about what was happening, his whole world was pulled out from under his feet, and he was left stumbling and falling as his attention was forcibly yanked back to his friends’ conversation.

“What are you thinking about?” Ross stared him down, as if the notion of his own business was long dead and buried. “Looking like that…”

Matty threw his shoulders up into a shrug, chancing a fleeting look across the bench towards Ross. “Nothing much…”

Adam so kindly, snorted, in response; Matty loved his friends, he really did.

“ _ What _ ?” Matty demanded, eyes widening as they swept over to Adam.

“That’s not a nothing look. That’s a… something’s  _ really _ bothering you look.” Adam seemed to regard the matter with amusement, lips curling up into a smile: one that Matty was hesitant to trust.

“Yeah.” Ross added, a little more sincerely. “I mean…” He turned over his shoulder, shooting a glance across at Charlotte. “It’s not  _ her _ is it? You said you weren’t bothered.”

“Yeah, like twenty thousand times.” Adam agreed, eyes growing widen with curiosity. 

Matty wondered, for the briefest of moments, just what his friends’ current speculations as to his current situation could honestly be; he reckoned at least that they might amuse him.

“Yes and no.” Honesty served Matty well, as long as it stood hand in hand with ambiguity. He stared his friends down with more force than he could have believed in.

“What does that mean-” Adam began to wonder aloud, but Ross didn’t quite let him get that far.

“ _ Oh _ .” The smugness of Ross’ smile was beyond unnerving. 

“What does  _ that _ mean?” Matty mirrored, folding his arms over his chest.

Ross drew out a sigh. “I saw you, you know? The other day.” His preface, at least, seemed relatively harmless.

“Yeah?” Matty, foolish at best, prompted for him to continue.

“Outside the bookshop.” Ross clarified, drawing his words out slowly, as if carefully poised between every breath. “With…  _ someone _ .”

“ _ With _ someone?” Adam’s eyes widened, glancing between Ross and Matty with nothing beyond excitement. Matty hardly appreciated the gesture, but still, he reckoned it could have been worse.

“Not…  _ with _ …” Ross explained, cheeks flushing a little. “Just… there… together… but…” He shot his eyes up to Matty’s. “Not exactly someone I thought I’d ever see you with, and I’m a bit worried if I’m honest.”

“Ross, what are you on about?” To his merit, Matty was at least honestly clueless: from Adam’s suggestion, his head was settled on this incident being one that related to a girl.

“I think it was George Daniel.” Ross leaned back, leaving the impact of his words to hit his two friends like merciless bombs from above.

Adam was the first to react, jaw dropping wide. “ _ Fucking hell _ , Matty.” He turned back to Ross. “You’re not  _ serious _ , are you?  _ Him _ and fucking… he’s… what does he even do now? Drugs?”

“More than drugs really.” Ross folded his arms across his chest. “Deals them too, I’ve heard. Or at least… his… his…” He struggled to quite find the right world.

“His  _ gang _ ?” Adam finished for him. “Yeah, they’re some fucked up people I’ve heard.”

“So, Matty…” Ross turned his attention back to his friend, sat still, silent, with his eyes to the ground. “If he’s…  _ pressuring _ you, or if he’s…  _ harassing _ you… or if he’s-”

“He’s not doing  _ shit _ .” Matty pulled his gaze up, throwing his eyes like grenades: burning and tearing holes into Ross’ skin. “ _ He’s… _ ” 

Matty’s chest tightened, unsure how to quite put his head back into place, how to make sense of everything hitting him all at once. Suddenly there was this sincere divide, between what he thought and what he knew, walking hand in hand with the world in which he sat around with Ross and Adam worrying about his ex-girlfriend, and the world in which he’d fallen from the bridge in the forest and George had caught him and held him in his arms.

He’d spent days insistent and dedicated solely to keeping that from his brain, to pushing such thoughts and feelings as far away as they could possibly get, but it was then, on that Tuesday morning, that everything came crumbling in.

Matty sat there: heart searing, head rocking with full-body tingles. For there was no denying the way it had felt. When George had held him like that. When the world suddenly seemed to fit as if made out of jigsaw pieces and not just broken shards of glass. 

He craved that kind of sense, despite what it brought with it. For the true nature of those feelings belonged to something that Matty dared not to answer to. Especially not with his friends’ eyes upon him, as he sat still and silent in the school yard.

“He’s nothing.” 

The words hurt; there was no denying it. Yet still they parted the air, and for a brief moment, Matty remembered what it was like to breathe easy.

Still, both pairs of eyes watched him, distrusting, wound up in a spiral of confusion. They wanted answers, they wanted explanations, they wanted the kind of solution that Matty was yet to even draw up from the explosion inside his chest.

Fate seemed to pity him, at least, and the bell sounded for the end of break, giving Matty ample opportunity to leap to his feet, and lose himself amongst the crowds of students, not even entirely sure as to what class he had next, but certain at least that he had to get away somewhere, to get away somehow.

Familiar footsteps dragged him through the bushes, and to a familiar smoking spot in the end. Yet what he’d sought in recluse, threw him back no such pleasure, for before him were uncomfortably familiar eyes, and the forever harsh burden of a knowing look in bubbling and stewing away from within.

“Well…” She drew out a sigh, pressing her back against the dusty brick wall: forever looking that same kind of beautiful as she had before. It just meant nothing at all, perhaps as he held it up to everything else, or at least to that just one specific feeling, to how it had been with George’s arms closed around his chest.

“Charlotte, fuck, sorry, I-” Matty drew out an apology: for that was all that seemed appropriate. In fact, his whole morning seemed to frame itself as one big inconvenience.

“I came here for you.” She explained, voice melodic even, as if she’d planned it, planned it all. His eyes chased any form of emotion across her face, but there was nothing at all. Nothing really. “I saw the way you were looking at me.”

He wondered if one day he’d be tired of pretending. Tired of an endless spiral of lies. But that day was at least not today.

“Did you?” Matty took a step forward, struggling to paint seduction and intrigue on a broken frame of a face. The truth at least remained throughout, that he had looked at her in a certain way, but although his eyes may have been upon her, his mind was elsewhere entirely.

Matty pulled his arms around her, and banished all thoughts of George from his mind: desperate to shut her up, to shut his mind up too. For there were just some things that he dared not quite explore, and perhaps the way he’d been looking at ‘her’ served as a perfect reflection of such.

Running out of ideas, stumbling over his own string of consciousness, he kissed her, and decided to be done with it.

She guided the kiss, pulling her fingers up to his hair, melting him under the warmth of her hands, dragged over every inch of exposed skin. Charlotte met his eyes like she owned them. And perhaps for that morning, she did.

It was easy, to let himself crumble, to let himself melt, to let their lips meld, to let their tongues meet, to diffuse the line between her and him. He saw sense in it, for perhaps it was easier to fall in love with a girl when her tongue was in your mouth. For perhaps that was all he aspired to do.

Yet as she dragged her lips down over his throat, as if keening to leave marks. Matty spared a thought: hasty and unplanned, his mind fell through, to George, not to feelings, but to words, to what had seemed to form a warning, uttered with earnest beyond Matty’s comprehension.

Matty let his eyelids flutter open, he fixed his gaze upon her, letting her lips sink into his neck. The thought was spared, but soon it multiplied, with the wrath of a disease, as if to destroy what good was left inside his chest. 

Still, he wondered if this was cowardice; he wondered what it took to be courageous, what would make him face his fears. He decided that honesty at least, would have been a start.

Up in his head, Matty had faced Charlotte head on and told her simply that he didn’t love her, that she was just a girl he’d kissed, and that although his eyes had been present, his mind had been elsewhere.

He would have answered his friends honestly, he would have stared Ross down like his words didn’t mean a thing at all. He would have told them it all - from the weed in the store, from the copy of ‘Christine’, to the bridge, to his place, to theirs too, to how George had caught him, to how George had maybe even saved his life, perhaps even in more ways than one.

Still, he enveloped himself up in the moment, in Charlotte’s hair, in Charlotte’s smile, in Charlotte’s lips. He did all he could, really, to kid himself that the air didn’t smell of pine needles, and that through his ears came anything but the sound of the flowing of a river.

But for the now, for the hasty morning, with thoughts torn from his head like shards of glass, it would do. Fuck, it would more than just  _ do _ .

It bided Matty out through the night: through rampant thoughts, through impossible dreams. Through every remnant of a twisted thought that might suggest otherwise about who he was perhaps inclined to love. He concluded instead that he didn’t believe in inclination, or perhaps even love itself.

Truly it was that notion, and that notion alone that kept him sane: that kept dark eyes open and earnest as hours drew on as if by torture designed to tear a confession out from his bones.

Yet the miraculous illusion of life itself passing him by was forever destined to fall. And perhaps it even did so before it could quite get to his feet. For it was no later than nine the next morning when Adam turned to him in imploration, and everything stopped.

“It’s back on?” The words were uttered with wide eyes: disbelieving, almost.

“What?” Matty’s words were a feeble dictation of any inner emotion or whim.

Adam spoke with his eyes: across the room, towards a familiar girl, and a smile so false it could have been painted upon her lips. She waved.

“I guess.” Matty brought his shoulders up to bracket his head, to hide himself away inside his chest.

“Thought you didn’t care about her.” Adam regarded the notion with little more than amusement; the ins and outs of Matty’s relationships didn’t bring him worry in the way it did to Ross.

Again, Matty shrugged, watching as she turned away, disappearing amongst the crowds of students, laughing with her friends, yet still smiling, that plastic smile. And for the briefest of moments, Matty did wonder if he ought to pity her.

“Why?” Adam posed what was easily the most obvious question, eyes boring holes into Matty’s head. “ _ Why  _ are you back together?”

Matty drew in a sigh, letting his gaze drift down to the ground. “It just sort of  _ happened _ .”

“Yeah…” Adam watched him dubiously. “I mean, I hate it when suddenly I’m snogging my worst enemy without knowing it-”

“Fuck off.” Matty told him, blunt at best. “That’s- she’s  _ not _ my worst enemy. She’s just a  _ girl _ .” And that said more than Matty could ever comprehend.

“Yeah, but…” Adam was determined to draw any form of confession from Matty’s lips. “You don’t love her.” He insisted, like that meant anything at all.

Matty did so much as  _ laugh _ in response - it did, in fact, take the both of them by surprise. “Who’s in love with  _ anyone _ at sixteen?”

Adam just stared, considering Matty as if suddenly, he didn’t know his friend at all. He wondered how he might make contact with the new person that stood beside him in Matty’s shoes. 

For this new Matty, whatever it was that had changed within him, seemed entirely distant, as if lost up in entirely the wrong mind; Adam pitied him with all he had. Yet, it seemed as if the last thing Matty could want was such a weak notion as someone else’s pity; it seemed from the fire forever burning in his eyes that he did indeed want something  _ more,  _ something that seemed to bare a kind of meaning he could cling to.

For Adam had watched him with both wonder and horror alike, as he placed the most falsified of kisses upon Charlotte’s lips, yet spoke to her so sweetly; it seemed even as if he was just acting, as if suddenly this was all a game. Yet for the life of him, Adam couldn’t quite determine what the prize on offer was here, what he’d set out to achieve, and perhaps whether it had been that itself which had spurred such a change in him.

He spared a thought for a world in which he still felt as if he knew his friend, for in truth, whatever lay so secretly inside Matty’s chest it seemed incomprehensibly broken, in the way that even seemed to scare him somehow.

-

Matty was almost content with it all in the end: forever chasing his heart around his chest with the intent to capture and destroy it. Yet, forever, it seemed to be one step ahead of him, as if it truly, knew him the best, and despite his dislike to the notion, he didn’t doubt it at all.

He found comfort, however, in the idle warmth of a late Thursday afternoon, in a lonely yet familiar building, in shelves laden with books, in a room barely lit from the dim remnants of sunlight strewn in from outside, in a single candle burning with an ardent flame: casting tall shadows throughout the room.

Matty condemned himself to his own thoughts, sitting idle behind the counter, daring to let his mind wander. He dared to ask himself just when his friends would have truly had enough, when they might begin to take matters into their own hands, and just what that could possibly entail. Matty didn’t want to say he feared such a notion, but still, he saw no use in lying to himself, about something so meaningless at least.

He was entirely spent, perhaps not in falsehood, but just repression of rampant thoughts, desperate to keep himself stable, on his feet, yet it was as if life had pulled itself out into a mile high tightrope walk, that was indeed impossible to make it across. Perhaps he should have regarded falling as an inevitable possibility - not the physical kind of falling, from the bridge, but in terms of his mental stability; there would forever be a plunge, nail-biting freefall, eternally awaiting him, and despite how much he fretted and worried, there was little Matty could do about it.

The evening presented itself as unwelcoming, with cloudy grey skies, that almost seemed adamant to break out in rain. As such, the streets, and the town itself was ultimately rather empty, despite the relief that peace and quiet brought him, it didn’t serve business very well. In fact, Matty was quick to consider shutting down the shop early: confident that not a soul was at all bothered that day.

Despite the frothing excitement with which he considered the notion, it never did quite make it off the ground, for before Matty could even ponder it in a manner at all logistical, it was shattered entirely to pieces, with the simple opening of the shop door.

Yet the eyes that met Matty’s were certainly not those of a customer - they were far too familiar for that: insistently burning two perfect holes right into Matty’s chest, as if burrowing to make a home.

“You’ve been hiding from me, haven’t you?” 

Despite the phrasing, Matty could gather that it wasn’t really a question: much more of an observation, spoke with undisturbed confidence, as fingers brushed over the spines of books, lined up neatly upon the shelves.

“Hiding?” The word escaped Matty’s lips, clinging to the spine of a shaky breath.

George wrangled his lips into a smile. “It’s been a week.” 

As the silence grew old, he subjected them both to his musings. “I think I might have missed you.”

“Well…” Matty drew out a breath, as if somewhat taken aback, as if his whole body was rewiring itself as he clung to George’s gaze. “That’s…  _ exceptionally _ kind of you.”

George snorted; sarcasm didn’t wear quite so well on him in such a state.

“No but seriously…” Matty drew out a sigh, yanking his gaze free and to the floor. “What is it? More drugs? Drugs you want me to hide - drugs you want me to…  _ take _ ? I don’t know.” His eyes burned like beacons, yet despite themselves, lost out in the dark.

George regarded him with wonder: a stewed away sort of compassion, staring down at the boy he was forever yet to quite figure out.

“No.” He told him simply, daring to take that step closer. “I’m here because I wanted to see you. Because I think I missed you, as stupid, as soppy as it sounds. Don’t  _ tell _ anyone, but I really did miss you.”

Matty managed a smile, tearing his eyes up to meet George’s.

“Well, look at that.” He mused aloud. “ _ I’m _ worth missing?”

“ _ Of course _ .” George exclaimed, as if he really did mean it; such a notion couldn’t help but baffle Matty.

“Sure it’s not just my extraordinary capacity to fall from relatively stable places? Or maybe just that I can’t say no to you…” Matty drew his lungs up into his throat: stumbling, choking, forever lost up inside his head.

“You can’t say no to me?” George laughed like he didn’t quite believe it. “The things I’d ask of you if that were true.” He curled his lips up into a smirk: Matty froze, eyes wide, fixated.

“Like what?” His insisted, voice trembling, suddenly so very aware of the forever decreasing distance between them.

George shook his head, well aware of the panic festering in Matty’s eyes; he wasn’t going to push it - he wasn’t stupid.

“ _ Like what? _ ” Matty demanded with an increased ferocity.

Still, all George had to offer him was a shake of his head.

“Bad stuff?” In George’s continued silence, Matty elected instead to fill in the gaps for himself. “Like  _ drugs _ , like-”

“Shut up.” George told him, struggling to keep his voice soft. “What’s got into you?” He asked,  _ honestly _ .

“Just…” Matty stared up at him, stomach twisting into knots. “There’s some shit my friends said. About…  _ you _ . About how you’re in a gang, about how I need to stay away from you.”

He drew out a sigh, daring not to hold George’s gaze. “I don’t know whether to believe it.”

George just scoffed, taking a step backwards, respecting at least that Matty might appreciate the space. “Have your friends ever  _ met _ me?” It was indeed, an honest question.

Matty thought for a moment before shaking his head.

“And do you really trust someone’s judgement on a person they’ve never met?” He arched his eyebrows, watching slowly, as second by second, moment by moment, cogs began to turn up inside his brain.

“And what do you think of me,  _ honestly _ ?” George drew out a sigh. “Was that the kind of impression you got?”

Matty shook his head.

With eyes fixated up at George, he wondered aloud. “I don’t think my friends would want to meet you. I don’t think they’re the kind of people… that would… allow themselves to be wrong about someone. To give people second chances. As nice as they are, I feel like they make judgements. And I think even, they have this idea of me as someone, someone I’m just not.”

He drew breath. “And that scares me.” He uttered, as if George might somehow have all the answers.

“Fuck them.” George told him rather plainly. “Fuck your friends and fuck what they think. Fuck anyone that makes you unhappy. Well… not  _ fuck _ , but… you know what I mean.”

Matty couldn’t help but giggle. It was a gesture that caught the both of them off guard.

“I’m not going to fuck my friends.” Matty clarified, as it might set George at ease.

“Alright.” George pulled his lips up into a grin. “Promise not to fuck my friends either and I’ll let you meet them. Because honestly, who the fuck ever said we were a ‘gang’? That’s just…” George shook his head. “They’re just some of my mates, and alright, some of them aren’t always very nice, but-”

“Yeah, that’s reassuring.” Matty couldn’t help but add: eternally dubious.

George shook his head. “Seriously, Jesse wants to meet you. Wants to figure out who smoked all that weed.” George broke out into a grin, just as Matty’s face grew impossibly white. “ _ No _ , he wants to meet you. To meet  _ Matty _ . The boy I’m always on about.”

And it was those words that did things to Matty’s chest that he simply could not explain. Maybe after all, George was wrong; he couldn’t say no to him at all, as here was every sign that this was ultimately a terrible idea, and still he stood by George’s side, practically leaping at the possibility.

The walk to the house wasn’t particularly lengthy, yet still the moments stretched out of their own accord, as if seeking some purpose within filling the time and unnecessarily pacifying the moment.

By the time Matty had closed the shop, the sun hung low in the skies: eager to slip out beyond the horizon and allow the darkness to envelope them entirely. Still, Matty found comfort in that notion: free from the blinding, white lights of the daytime, and the menial kind of common sensical thoughts that he ought to have chased up until the point in which he fully understand every one of them.

The night seemed to give him leeway, to give the both of them the air to breathe, for fingers to brush gently against one another’s as they walked, and yet require nothing to be said of it. They shared a cigarette - just the one between the two of them; it made Matty glad for the thick blanket of the darkness that clung to them, for he knew that people would have stared and talked and wondered if they had at all been able to see.

Reality presented itself soon enough: it was under the cloak of darkness that Matty felt free to breathe as himself, to live through his body, and not just curl up inside his chest. He looked up at George and wondered if he could feel it; the change, perhaps not even just in him, but the two of them.

For there was something emanating from George, that although, Matty entirely failed to put his finger on, still remained as something of note: a distant wonder that entwined the two of them further as they made their way through winding, abandoned, late night streets, in search of a little rundown house on the corner.

Matty was left idle, to his own skin, to his own bones, as George reached into his jacket pocket and turned his key in the lock. The very moment that the door slid open, the sounds of life and laughter resonated from inside; George couldn’t help but let a smile tug at his lips.

Matty watched him: in awe, in wonder, and followed the older boy inside. He noted immediately, the sense of disarray in which the whole house seemed to be; comprised of peeling, ugly, flowery wallpaper, rampant coffee stains, wine stains, the yellowing of tar coating all that had once gleamed and glistened white. Cracks and scrapes tore through the furniture to the extent that it seemed as they had been placed their upon intent, and above the two of them, a lightbulb hung naked from the ceiling: flickering every few seconds.

Still, despite it all, Matty couldn’t avoid the warmth that overtook him - for it was more than just a physicality, more than just the heating, more than just the weather, more than just the day. It was the kind of warmth that seemed to dictate the notion that the house was alive, and indeed physically so; it was a welcoming warmth that drew Matty in, even as he stumbled over the doorstep - hesitant and unwavering - it pulled him inside, making it clear to him that regardless of what became of him, regardless of who he’d once been, this house was forever a home.

It made a change from the darkness: from respite he’d found in the smothering inky black skies, for inside, under even flickering light, there was still no need to hide. Matty brushed gentle fingertips up against the wall to his right, taking off a thin layer of dust with it; the gesture, however, served as a ‘thank you’, an ineloquent gratitude, all he could quite muster at the moment.

George watched him, half-way amused, smile curling up at the corners of his lips.

“It’s nice.” Matty murmured in response: unsure as to whether he was speaking to George or to the house itself. “It’s a nice place.”

George snorted: desperate to present the facade that he found such an idea ludicrous. Yet, of course, deep down, the pull, the warmth - he felt it too. Matty could see it instantly.

“I like it.” He concluded, turning his head towards the doors that extended off from the hallway: intrigued by the sounds of muffled conversation from behind them. As much as the idea of meeting George’s friends excited him, he had to confess that simply nothing had ever intimidated him more.

He’d seemed to have clung to this notion of making a good impression, as if that held any sort of worth in a house like this - one that lay itself out on the table, bad impressions aside, and held its soul and inclinations up to the light for the whole world to see. But Matty couldn’t do that - not quite yet; there was still so much he clung to, still so much dragging him, and although tonight was certainly a  _ night _ , it was by no means the night to end them all.

George offered him a smile before leading him down the corridor. “Come on.” He offered, leaving Matty to trail behind him: eyes wandering around the room, as if somehow still entirely captivated by their surroundings.

When George pushed the living room door open, he came to reveal no more than four people, despite the sounds of laughter and excitement overheard that had seemed to have accounted for at least twenty. Two girls were sat together upon one particularly moth-eaten sofa, whereas one boy stood before them, fumbling with a small bag of weed, as the second paced around the back of the room, as if to ransack the shelves for something.

It was the girls who were the first to take note of their intrusion: looking from George to Matty with a kind of intrigue that Matty struggled to quite make any sense of at all.

“So that’s where you’ve been.” The curly haired girl wrestled a smirk from her lips. She turned to the other three, as suddenly, Matty and George, standing hesitant in the doorway, seemed to command the whole world’s attention.

George drew out a sigh, seeming to glare at each of his friends in turn; Matty couldn’t help but deny that the encounter had entirely continued to baffle him. 

“This is Matty.” He gestured vaguely towards him, leaving Matty to flush under the weight of several imploring gazes. “Be nice to him.” He added, his voice significantly sterner that time around.

The boy who’d been fumbling around with the weed, took in a sigh, shooting the other three an unreadable expression before approaching the two. He glanced from George to Matty, and then back again, before eventually settling piercing eyes into George’s throat as he addressed him.

“Is he your new ‘girl’ then?” He drew out a laugh: amused, at best by the situation.

Matty’s heart froze inside of his chest. “I’m not a girl.” His tone was sloppy: words uttered all too fast - the entire notion was almost entirely comical.

“ _ Jesse _ -” George uttered, as if in warning.

“I  _ know _ .” Jesse drew his lips out into a grin, disregarding George entirely in favour of the curly haired boy, with the eyes that flickered so bright in the light. “Oh, but he’s not fussed.”

Before Matty could quite even began to think about comprehending just what that could mean, the other boy made his way over from the other corner of the room. He eyed Matty and George for just a moment, before concluding that his interest had indeed receded, and turned to Jesse instead.

“It’s half nine.” He uttered, speaking more with his eyes. Matty was too caught up in the sudden whirlwind mess of his own head to even fathom beginning to dissect the meaning behind such a notion.

“Yeah.” Jesse drew out a sigh, thrusting the bag of weed into George’s grasp. “We’ve gotta…” He eyed Matty momentarily. “ _ Go _ .”

George folded his arms across his chest. “Alright. Fine.” It was evident that he didn’t exactly appreciate their time, yet still, he had no qualms with letting them pass out into the hallway and through the front door.

In their absence, George led Matty into the room, positioning himself on the slightly less dilapidated of the sofas, and gesturing for Matty to take the seat next him.

“Don’t worry about Jesse - he’s a dickhead.” One of the girls supplied, all too nonchalantly, as she lit herself a cigarette.

“Mmm…” The other nodded in particularly enthusiastic agreement. “I’m Gemma - that’s Chelsea.” She explained, gesturing to the girl beside her.

Matty nodded, warming up to their smiles. “Nice to meet you.”

George laughed, so very amused by Matty’s sudden insistence to be polite, especially to the girls that had just proudly declared that another of their friends was a dickhead.

“You know George goes on about you…” Chelsea drew her lips out in a grin; George looked as if he could have killed her in that moment.

“Oh…” Matty flushed red, stumbling over his words as he glanced back and forth between George and the girls. “Does h-he?”

“Good things.” Chelsea assured him: settling the worried look in his eyes. “Thinks you’re sweet.”

George wanted to bury himself between the cushions of the sofa and condemn himself to die there: it seemed like a much better alternative to whatever their conversation seemed insistent to throw at him.

Matty’s cheeks burned red, staring up at George with pure disbelief. “ _ Sweet _ ? Have you even met me at all? I think I’ve spent more time taking the piss out of you than anything else.”

“Yeah, but…” George drew out a sigh, nestling his face in the palms of his hands. “That’s kind of sweet that, isn’t it?”

“You fucking weirdo.” Matty shook his head in disbelief, to wide grins and eager laughter from the girls, yet nothing more than burning cheeks on George’s part.

There was a great tug of something Matty struggled to explain resonating from the depths of his stomach, but he elected to ignore it for the moment - to push it away and simply pray that it might choose not to plague his mind, that the house might just fight it off, smothering it as it pushed it to the ground. For all he wanted, was that evening, not even just with George’s friends, but with George himself - curled up on that sofa, talking shit, and not giving a fuck.

It was truly a wonderful notion: freeing, and perhaps even entirely incomprehensible to the skittish, wide-eyed boy who’d locked himself up inside the bookshop to avoid his problems: to chase away every question that had ever once chanced demanding an answer of him.

For in that moment, under warm light and comforting eyes, it didn’t matter - truly. The house made it known; it was irrelevant - how he felt about George, and just what that might one day amount to. He wished every house could have been like this one, perhaps cracks and dust aside. Yet still, they meant nothing in the scheme of things.

Matty allowed the house to envelope him: to lose himself completely in its warmth, as strands of conversation drifted around his head - distant, incomprehensible. It was however, comfortable that way; he felt safe, with his side pressed to George’s, and his eyelids heavy as the night dragged in.

He dared not worry what might become of the morning, for whatever horror might dare to present itself in the sunlight, it was clear that for that night, in that house, it simply could not concern him.

There was perhaps an element of the notion that felt ridiculous - even dangerous, almost. Yet still, Matty clung to it like it was all he had, and indeed somehow all he might ever need.

Time flew by him, blanketing him in an inescapable cocoon: condemned to lay up inside his head for the night. It wasn’t a fate he took much to dislike to however, in fact, it seemed rather necessary - to put his head to rest for a while: to let foreign air freely into his lungs. The house would keep him safe; he trusted that.

If Matty had not been asleep, he would have found himself in eternal debates with himself over the matter of exactly where he ought to draw the line between George and the house, as from where things seemed to be, there was hardly much of an emotional difference anymore.

As he knew deep in his heart, and through every one of his bones, George would keep him safe; he’d never quite trusted it, but he’d proved it now, after all. And that could never be something Matty could escape. 

That wasn’t quite how things came to be in the end: George coming to Matty’s aid - that was all a bit fairytale, the story of the perfect, happy, beautiful boys from the city; still, Matty couldn’t help but fantasise about it.

Matty was awoken in the middle of the night: shadows cast long around the whole room, dark besides one single candle lit on the edge of a shelf across the length of the room.

He blinked slow, taking in the moment: struggling to quite assure himself of who and where he was. The more troubling question was, however, why he was awake. As moments passed him by, in what felt like half-time, with heavy eyelids, and twitching fingertips, he concluded that there was no disturbance in the room, in the house.

It was then, that he laid himself back down on the sofa to get back to sleep that everything clicked. The absence became far too apparent with the butterflies in his stomach, with the air around him suddenly rushing and swarming as if in ovation. His chest clenched, his heart stilled, his lungs trembled; George was gone.

Matty didn’t think twice before stumbling to his feet, brushing messy curls from his face as he attempted to traverse the unfamiliar, pitch black room. He didn’t reach the door without a few scrapes across his knees, but such a notion presented itself as entirely irrelevant in the light of George’s absence.

He felt entirely stupid as he reached the hallway and the brief notion of George having just gone to the bathroom hit him; he thought at least that it might provide him with some relief. Yet it took no more than ten seconds longer for such to be inevitably proven as not the case, for from the kitchen, Matty caught a soft sniffling sound.

It stopped him dead in his tracks, as he took care to take silent footsteps closer towards the doorway. He struggled to make things out through the darkness, but there, before him, was George - there was no doubt about it.

Matty watched: stomach descending to his knees as the moments drew longer, distorted almost. For under the spell of the darkness and the erratic convulsions of Matty’s heart, George seemed to stand there making himself a glass of water for hours, tears even beginning to freeze in place upon his cheeks.

He found that he just didn’t quite have it within himself to walk in: to face George like this - this new George, who was clearly in quite a mess. Matty didn’t reckon he knew at all how to deal with that. Yet, as the minutes ticked by, and Matty watched George, he condemned himself to wonder just what it was that was wrecking so much havoc up inside his head.

He thought for a moment that it killed him - just to stand there, to let it happen, to let him be so obviously hurt. Matty thought about George’s arms curled tightly around him: having caught him, having kept perhaps the most meaningful of all promises.

It was with that which Matty finally  _ dared _ : pushing his words out like a breeze through the darkness. As gentle as it was, it caught George’s attention nonetheless.

“Are you alright?” It took Matty all of two seconds to conclude that it was the most stupid question he could have asked.

George turned to face him: eyes blown wide, as if he couldn’t quite believe that the boy standing before him in the lowlight was at all real.

“No, you’re not.” Matty answered for himself, daring to take a step closer, running his fingertips across the walls as he did so, as still, even in the midst of whatever this had turned out to be, the house brought him comfort through it.

George drew out a sigh, desperately trying to rub the tears from his eyes. Matty reached for the lightswitch on his way in: illuminating George’s red cheeks, and messy hair, fit together imperfectly with the distant kind of glossy look in his eyes.

Matty knew then that he was  _ entirely _ out of his depth; yet still, he continued to swim.

“What’s wrong?” He asked, standing within arm’s reach of George, yet still he was forever hesitant to touch him, as if he might crumble in his grasp.

George shook his head, staring Matty down for just a moment, before the world seemed entirely unreal: the moment eternal, and yet forever quite of his grasp. Perhaps it was only that very feeling that could quite explain what he did next, for nothing else seemed to quite cover it.

As upon that Friday morning, at barely ten minutes past three, with tears on his face, George grabbed Matty by the hair and kissed him.

Blood rushed throughout Matty’s body, as if his heart had stopped entirely, for in that moment, as he hung limp, pliant, he let George move him into shape, into the boy he wanted him to be. And those butterflies from Matty’s stomach, they finally took flight.

It took all of thirty seconds before George actually seemed to realise just what he’d done, yet still, the realisation came crashing down upon him with an indescribable force, as he yanked himself away from Matty, stumbling back onto his feet, and seeming to fling himself backwards across the half of the room.

In the silence, in the comedown, Matty stood, still, beyond words, beyond comprehension, for George was still on his lips, for he tasted like early morning air, and tobacco, and  _ boy _ . And Matty knew then, in that very moment that it was not something he’d be able to get out of his mind for the rest of his life.

“I shouldn’t have done that.” George’s voice lay low, as if itself in repent. 

As much as Matty’s heart was ferociously inclined to disagree, it was not something he could formulate into thoughts, let alone words. Instead, he gave a nod, pulling his head to the floor.

“Yeah…” He managed a breathy sigh, as if stumbling to relearn the entire English language in the space of a minute. “I’ve-....” Matty stopped himself, guessing somehow that any reminder about Charlotte was just something that George didn’t need that moment.

Yet still, as they stood there, it struggled to yet quite sink in, for George had  _ kissed _ him. Beautiful, idiotic, and a little bit intimidating, George Daniel had kissed him. On the mouth. And it was beyond describable, perhaps even beyond anything else Matty had ever experienced before, and that didn’t half scare him.

“ _ Fuck _ .” George cursed, burying his head in his hands and throwing his back against the wall.

“It’s okay…” Matty’s voice was little more a desperate whimper. “George, fuck, what’s wrong?”

George once again shook his head. “I just keep fucking things up.”

“No you don’t.” Matty told him, as if he had any right to say such a thing, as if he really knew George at all.

“I just fucked this up, didn’t I?” George cut into his words with the kind of brash laughter that had Matty’s insides trembling. “Fucking hell. I really shouldn’t have-”

“George…” Matty drew out a sigh. “If you…  _ want _ to… if it would make you feel better, we can just pretend that it never happened-”

“Fuck pretending.” George threw out a sigh. “That’s all I ever fucking do. Pretend to be this, pretend to be that. It’s fucked. It’s actually  _ fucked _ .”

“What do you mean?” Matty found it within him to dare to inquire.

George shook his head, pacing around the room, before finally turning to face Matty under the dim kitchen light, and drawing in a breath. 

“I fucked things up with my family, so I left, and I went and pretended that none of it had ever happened and that I never knew them. But then, course, I fucked things up with the friend I was staying with, so again I left, and pretended, and then on to the next somebody to fuck over. It’s a cycle. It’s inescapable, and here we go again. Here I’ve fucked up now - properly-”

“No you haven’t.” Matty demanded with more force than he was at all capable of commanding. “Don’t leave. You’re not leaving - I’m not letting you, I’m not, I’m-”

“Fuck…” George threw his head back against the wall, still, turning to look at Matty, like after this all, he still failed to quite figure him out.

With a shaky breath, he found it within himself to continue. “But it’s what… it’s what I  _ always do _ .” 

Matty shook his head.

“Fuck always. Fuck everything before. Think about right now. Think about this kitchen. Think about this house. Think about your friends. Think about all you’d leave behind. Think about… me. Think about…  _ us _ .”

George drew in a deep breath, and for the first time, changed his mind.

-


	5. "me too."

“I was back there again.” The preface seemed simple enough, but in reality, it had hardly scratched the surface of all that lay hidden away beneath it. 

“Back where?” She dared to wonder through eyes blown wide.

He dismissed her words with a puff of smoke: a steady exhale, as if he rested his life upon the cigarette lain limp between his fingertips.

“H-...” He stopped himself. “With my family.” The conclusion was far more abrupt and certainly less intimate; he thought such a slip up had gone on largely unnoticed, however from the concern in her eyes, it wasn’t at all possible that she could have missed it. 

“And it was bad?” She simply took the cigarette from his fingertips; it was unnecessary to ask.

“Yeah. It was.” He supplied, desperate to try and twist his tongue around the words that had dared to crawl up his throat.

“Why?” She was stupid enough to dare to ask for more , even with the mess that had already befallen him. “Why was it bad? What exactly happened?”

He dug his teeth into his bottom lip - not just to tear the skin, but as if to dig a hole inside of himself in which he could hide. For curling up inside himself forever seemed like a much more favourable alternative when held against the situation at hand.

“She never looked me in the eye, you know? After it all happened.” He drew out a sigh, gripping onto the brickwall behind them as if for dear life. 

“At first she had just so much to say about everything, you know calling me every name under the sun, spewing out every falsified suspicion she could lay her hands on. Like a permanent lecture - going on for weeks. And then, yeah, she just didn’t look at me anymore. Didn’t acknowledge me. Likely didn’t acknowledge me leaving either. Not really at least.”

“That’s fucked, I’ve told you.” She halved the distance between them, pulling an arm around his waist in the hopes that it might better things somehow.

“I know. I know. I know.” He finished his cigarette, stubbing it out against the paving slabs below, before proceeding to fold his arms firmly across his chest. “But in my dream, she was looking at me again. I was back there. I walked in through  _ our _ living room, into  _ our _ hallway, but into  _ that _ kitchen. That fucked with my head. And then, she was there - staring me down, as if she’d never look away.”

“Did she say anything?” She prompted further: eager to elicit some form of comprehension from the entire scenario.

“Yeah…” It was instantly evident, just from the tone of his response, that whatever she’d uttered - it hadn’t been good.

He thought for a moment, dragging out the silence as much as he could. For in all earnest, perhaps the last thing he wanted to do was spell it all out to here, to even let her inside his head like this, but it had come to the point where he’d began to think that if he just didn’t let it out soon enough, it just might drive him mad.

“After about a minute. She opened her mouth, looked me dead in the eyes and said, ‘What are you doing here, George? You’re a filthy fucking faggot and you’re not welcome in this house anymore’.”

He felt his chest beginning to rattle with the intake of breath: his whole body on edge - trembling as if it just might snap. 

“So I turned to the door - I tried to get out, to get out of there, but then I open the door, and it leads me into  _ that _ hallway, not into our hallway, not anywhere near where I went to sleep, and I run through the whole house - into each and every room, but she’s still there, and she’s still got so much to say. She kept getting louder as well, staring me down and yelling the same sort of shit, and then she started to repeat ‘I know what you’re like. I know what you’re thinking. Don’t you know it’s wrong?’.”

“She’s fucked in the head, though, isn’t she? Not you. She doesn’t know what she’s on about, and don’t tell me you’re even anything close to listening to her, because that’s just outrageous bullshit. You can’t help who you are.”

“Yeah, Chelsea…” George muttered. “I know. Like I can’t help have fucked up dreams about my mother even though I haven’t seen her since I was sixteen. Doesn’t matter whether I can help it or not, really?”

“Don’t let it get to you, though.” She met his eyes with the kind of concern that was so earnest it almost came on a little disconcertingly. “It wasn’t real, and you’re never going to see her again. It doesn’t matter - it shouldn’t upset you.”

“Doesn't matter whether it should or it shouldn’t…” George drew out a sigh. “Because it fucking does. I can’t control whether things get to me or not, Chelsea. No one’s fucking head works like that. And it doesn’t matter whether it was just in my head, because she's said things like that before. She thinks of me like that. And then, she's never just going to be the only one.”

“I don’t. I don't think of you like that.” Chelsea fought to stress her point. “I don’t, and neither does Jesse, neither does Gemma, neither does John.” She thought for a moment. “And I bet Matty doesn’t either. You said he’s smart, didn’t you? Properly reads books and that - then he should know what he’s on about, like she obviously doesn’t.”

George shook his head: entirely unconvinced. “I doubt he’s reading books about gay rights, though? Is he?” 

“Could be.” Chelsea gave a shrug.

“Yeah, doesn’t feel like it. He looked proper freaked out when Jesse said that I wasn’t fussed whether he was a boy or not.” George couldn’t help but cringe at the recollection. “And you know he said some bullshit about being scared about what ‘queer’ means, and I-...” 

“You what?” She watched him carefully: sensing the rather abrupt change in his manner.

“Oh fuck, I-...” He drew his eyes out wide: memories hitting him with the weight of bricks. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, I-... last night. Fucking hell. Last night. He woke up as well, and we talked a bit before I went back to sleep, and, I’d forgotten it with everything else, with the other dream and everything else, but I fucking… I was crying, I was fucked in the head, it was three in the morning, but I kissed him.”

“You… what?” Chelsea felt the world freezing around her for a moment: unsure if she could have possibly heard correctly.

“I fucking kissed him.” George chose even to revel in his own impulsive stupidity.

“What did he-”

“I stopped myself in the end, and apologised and… fucking cried a bit more, and fuck, he looked really fucked up about it, but told me it was fine, and I-... he’s… too nice to me, I hate it.”

“George, I think if he had any real problem with your sexuality, he would have reacted a little bit more violently if you kissed him.” She shook her head in disbelief. “I can’t believe you fucking kissed him. You have a dream about your mum screaming at you for liking guys, and then you wake up and snog the first one that talks to you.”

George shook his head: the gesture was pathetic, half-hearted, but he was trying, easing up to the afternoon.

“For one, it really wasn’t snogging. It was like a really brief plain kiss, alright? And then, I didn’t kiss him because he was just the first boy that talked to me, it wasn’t like- fuck, it wasn’t like… getting back at her, or anything. I didn’t kiss him to make a point. I think I kissed him, because I was sad, and high, and fucked in the head, and it was three in the morning, and still, he looked beautiful.”

Chelsea was silent for the few moments that followed.

“You’re in love with him, you are.” She’d intended to speak with a much more comical tone, treating the situation with as much humour as she could muster, yet it was a feat she didn’t quite manage.

George’s cheeks burned red, staring up at her with disbelief. 

“I’m not.” He protested, eyes widening by the second.

“Okay, maybe not in love, but you-... it’s not like with Cam, or with every other random girl, or every other random boy, or like with me.” She drew out a sigh, not quite daring to meet George’s eyes.

“Chels…” He swallowed hard. “I…”

“It’s alright.” She managed a smile. “I know. Things were always like that. I think I did love you for a bit, but not anymore, you know? Because here we go with Matty - perfect, beautiful, Matty, who’s entirely stolen your heart.

“He’s not stolen my heart, he’s stolen my weed, if anything.” George grumbled, yet all Chelsea could manage to do was snort in response.

“You’ve got feelings for him, though. Proper stupid, fucking feelings.” Chelsea knew what she said was true.

“Yeah, but he’s sixteen, and he’s scared to say the word ‘gay’, and he’s got a girlfriend, and I really shouldn’t be getting mixed up with him. It’s like exactly the sort of thing that’s destined to end badly.” George shook his head.

“How do you know if you’re not going to try?” She stared him down in disbelief. “Come on, if you don’t at least try, I’m seriously going to be disappointed in you if you don’t. You’d be cute together - I think he’d really make you happy.”

“I  _ am _ happy.” George protested, dragging his gaze to the floor.

“Okay.” She added, entirely unconvinced. “If you were happy, why would you go around fucking every dickhead who’ll smile at you. If you were happy you’d have better things to do with your time. Trust me, I have first hand experience.”

“Chels…” George didn’t quite know what to say.

“It’s alright, I really don’t need a pep talk, from you, alright?” She shook her head rather decisively. “I mean life gets alright as long as you’ve got some drugs and some dick.” She gave way to a laugh.

“Yeah…” George drew his gaze up to the sky: setting his eyes on the horizon, unsure quite where the world ended and the sky began. “And this is going to sound… I don’t know… I’m just… I worry that he’s not going to take it seriously. Because me liking guys is one thing, but then me being bisexual is another. It’s almost as if being gay is just easier for people to comprehend - maybe it’s because when you’re bisexual you’re only fucking men about half the time, so they can’t decide whether that’s sufficient enough to condemn you to hell or not.”

“I don’t think Matty’s like that.” Chelsea offered him a smile. George seemed determined to ignore it regardless. “I think you’ve got a shot and you need to take it.”

“And how do you imagine me doing that?” George asked, dubious as always.

“Well…” Chelsea thought for a moment. “There’s a thing next weekend - invite him along, get him drunk, get him high, whatever. And just go for it. Kiss him again, but don’t apologise for it this time. Tell him you think he’s hot, and just kiss him - go for it.”

“Yeah, that seems like it’s going to go  _ incredibly _ wrong.” George shook his head, grimacing a little at the thought.

“No, trust me - it’ll be fine. If he doesn’t like it, if he’s not on board, then alright, he’s not interested, you need to move on. And next morning just fix it all by saying you were too high to know what you were doing, so it’s fine, and it meant just as little to you as it did to him.”

“That’s… lying though.” George made a rather astute observation.

“What like telling yourself you don’t fancy him at all is also lying? Like saying that you don’t want to kiss him, that you don’t at least want to give it a shot is lying?” Chelsea narrowed her eyes at him.

And from there onwards it barely took a moment before George had broken.

“Oh fuck it. Alright.”

Chelsea’s eyes lit up with excitement. “You’ll do it?”

“Yeah.” George’s cheeks flushed red, eyes to the ground. “I’ll do it. He muttered; voice barely more than a whisper, as still, the prospect couldn't help but just terrify him; despite all of Chelsea’s encouraging words, there was no avoiding that.

-

He was on the phone when George walked in: unannounced, unexpected, always. 

He reckoned he liked it better that way, though: watching those cheeks flush red, watching those eyes grew wide, watching those pink lips curl out into a smile. It was things like that which got George through the week.

That time, however, was different. And not in a way that George could say he liked. For Matty barely gave him more than a fleeting glance as he walked into the bookshop, before reverting his attention fully back to the phone call, leaving George to mill around the room, feeling more discarded than reason suggested that he should.

He couldn’t help but wonder just who was on the other end of the line, keeping Matty so transfixed, and so disregarding of George’s mere presence.

“I told you.” Matty had repeated those three words for something close to the tenth time within the five minutes in which George had taken the liberty of listening in. He paced back and forth throughout the shop, brushing half-amused fingertips over spines of largely forgotten about hardbacks.

“I told you I would.” Matty continued: voice appearing to get more desperate by the second. “I did- no, I’m not fucking you around, I’m…” He drew out a breath, one that left George to question just how much he really wanted to continue this conversation.

“No. What the fuck do you think I’m saying it for then? I’m not that kind of guy.” Matty grew increasingly more on edge, sneaking fleeting glances in George’s direction, as if all he wanted was to continue the conversation free from the weight of George’s gaze.

“What do you mean ‘what kind of guy am I then’? You know me. You fucking well know what kind of guy I am.” As much as Matty appeared to grow irritated with the person on the other end of the line, it seemed to appear that he was growing rather irritated with himself, perhaps the honest nature of the guy he truly or was, or for some other unspecified truth that George yearned to know.

“No, I’m not trying to start an argument with you, I’m-” Matty was cut off, looking much more inclined to hang up than anything else.

“I said I’m working. Well, I’m supposed to be, instead of talking to you. No. In fact…” Matty allowed his eyes to wander over to George. “In fact, there’s a customer here in the shop right now-”

George couldn’t help but snort in response, as after all, they both knew far too well, that George had never stepped inside the bookshop with the intent to buy something.

“No, I’m serious - I’m… I need to serve him-” Matty did a poor job of subduing the smirk that approached his lips. George struggled just as much with putting aside his laughter.

“Yeah, alright- Charlotte, look… I’ll see you later.” All of a sudden, Matty grew very, very still, and very, very pale. “Yeah… love you too.” He managed, pulling his words from his lips with force.

“Bye.” Was all he could muster in the end before slamming the phone down onto the hook.

George faced Matty, arms folded across his chest, more than half-way dubious, as he finally turned to face him.

“Yeah, alright, don’t you give me shit as well.” Matty groaned: tone far from the amused, confident one George had grown accustomed to.

“I…” George struggled to quite form an adequate response, daring to take a step closer to Matty, to the bridge the gap between them. “I wasn’t going to.”

Truthfully, George had never been at all sure of what he was going to say, but he doubted that would have sat as well with Matty. 

“But I don’t love her. And you know.” Matty laughed - more at himself than George. “And you always go on about how I’m making myself unhappy like this - and you saw it then, didn’t you? I mean, that was not a happy phone call - there’s no way around that.”

“Yeah, but…” George shook his head. “I figured something out - it’s not my decision whether you break up with her or not.”

“Yeah…” Matty bit his lip: immediately drawn back to that kiss and that kitchen, just a few nights before. And yet, it seemed worlds away, as if it had been a kiss between two boys entirely different to the ones that stood in the bookshop that Wednesday afternoon.

“But you’re right.” Matty’s conclusion was a simple one, but certainly not an easy one. 

“How can I possibly know what I’m talking about, though? I’ve never even met her.” George shook his hair, desperate to admit to himself that he simply wasn’t so desperately compensating for the kiss; for all that had fallen through.

“Maybe you don’t need to.” Matty approached George, fitting comfortably inside his shadow. “I think we both know that it’s fucked, that we’re both unhappy. I just think…. If i broke up with her - I’d need a reason. And I can’t quite bring myself to figure out why I’m unhappy yet myself.”

“Why not?” Despite everything screaming at him otherwise, George still dared to ask.

“Because it doesn’t make sense in the way it should.” Matty supplied the most feebly vague of statements, as if it might have been enough.

“And there’s a set way in which anything should make sense?” George wondered, truly intrigued by the notion that had set itself up inside of Matty’s mind.

“No, I mean-...” Matty was at a loss for words; truthfully, he didn’t quite know what he really did mean at all.

“Are you just scared to say it to her face?” George couldn’t help but smirk: struggling to imagine the kind of girl that had left him in such a state. “Kind of sweet, that, really.”

“No.” Matty replied: far too quickly, far too insistent, even seeming to feign the notion that he truly knew himself.

“Then just do it. Who ever said you had to have a reason. Just say it doesn’t ‘feel right’. Spew out some bullshit like that. Let it be done with. Because you’ve got better things to do with your afternoons than sit through bullshit phone calls with a girl you don’t care about.”

“What? Like work?” Matty raised his eyebrows: somehow uncertain that it had been exactly what George had been pointing to.

George gave a shrug. “If you say so. Or like, hanging out with me. Like tonight, or tomorrow, or maybe this weekend. Because there’s this thing-” Before George could quite muster the confidence to properly go through with it, he was cut off yet again.

“Things would get quite fucked if we broke up.” Matty dared to try to explain. “Things would get messy for me, I think. The kind of messy I really shouldn’t have to deal with.”

“What?” George raised his eyebrows. “People calling you queer?”

Matty hesitated for just a moment, before finally relenting, and dragging himself out into a nod. 

“Scared?” George drew out a sigh, shaking his head. “No offence, Matty, but maybe when you get so terrified about the idea of some dickhead at school calling you queer because you broke up with a pretty girl, think about the people who get called queer and actually are. Think about the people whose lives turn to shit because they’re queer. Think about them, because really, they have it harder than you.”

Matty stopped for a moment, as if the notion was one he’d never truly considered before. 

Taking his silence as an excuse, George continued. “You know what happens to boys who kiss boys, to girls who kiss girls? They get bullied and beaten up, and thrown out of their homes, and abandoned by their friends, disowned by their fathers, cursed by their mothers, stared at in the street like they’re the scum of the earth, truly hated and loathed. There are people out there who dedicate their entire lives to trying to hurt them, to trying to destroy the so ‘disgusting’ concept of homosexuality. And it’s fucked up. Because no one can help who they love. It hurts just as much to repress it, to pretend, to deny yourself…” George drew out a sigh.

“I’m-” Matty began. George didn’t let him finish.

“Some dickhead calling you queer isn’t shit in comparison to the fucking shit people get for being gay on the daily.” George shook his head, pressing his back against the bookshelf. Part of him was desperate to apologise - for snapping like that, for creating such a scene, but in his heart, he had no desire to do so at all.

“But… I…” Matty drew his gaze to the floor, retreating back inside of himself. “I kissed you. What would happen if people found out, I-”

George shook his head. “ _ I _ kissed you. That’s different.” He didn't quite dare to fully look Matty in the eye, but still, he didn’t deny himself the right to continue. “And they won’t. You’ve got nothing to worry about. You didn’t want to kiss me.”

There was a look in Matty’s eyes; one George couldn’t decode - one he didn’t quite dare to. And a brave look upon his face, as if to dictate the turn their conversation was ought to take. 

“So… you’re… gay… then…?” Matty finally managed: to speak the words aloud, finally having it within him. As stupid as it sounded, it was a lot for the boy who’d been so very afraid of simply the word ‘queer’.

“No.” George drew out a sigh, fixating his gaze upon the shop window, to the world outside: to every unknowing passerby.

“I’m bisexual.” George told him: firmly - he always needed to. “That’s where you like both.”

“Oh…” Matty trailed off, heart thudding inside his chest. “So you got shit for that?”

“Yeah…” George figured that perhaps the last thing he wanted to do was talk about it, but Matty stared up at him so openly, so,  _ curious _ , more than anything. There didn't’ seem to be an ounce of judgement in his eyes, and George couldn’t help but take comfort in that.

“I’m sorry.” Matty went quiet, staring up at George; at the boy who’d kissed him.

“It’s better now, I mean, even Jesse’s hardly a dickhead about it.” George managed a laugh. “And I think Jesse’s a dickhead about everything, but… things were… a bit fucked before, wherever I went, you know? Someone would find out, and there’d be a boy, and things would just fall apart, because things wouldn’t work, I’d get too drunk, or too high, and stop thinking straight - quite literally, and then… things got like… I had to leave.

“Was it like that at home?” Matty dared to ask, eyes widening a little. “Was that why you left in the first place, did you like-”

“I don’t want to talk about it.” George drew out a sigh, throwing his head up to the ceiling. “At least not now.” He added as an afterthought. “At least not here.”

Matty watched him from behind those impossibly dark eyes of his: George envied that kind of beauty.

“I mean…” George drew out a sigh. “Anyone could come in. And that’d fuck things up for you as well as me. And I’m sober, and I… I’ll start crying, and you know what happened last time I started crying. We don’t need that shit all over again.”

Matty managed a grin. “It wasn’t that bad.” He insisted. “The kiss.”

George rolled his eyes. “Still.” He turned his head away, desperate to subdue his blush. “‘Not that bad’ hardly glorifies it.”

“I mean…” Matty trailed off, smirk painted across his lips. “I am quite handsome. Can’t really blame you for wanting to kiss me.”

“Oh fuck off!” George exclaimed, giving him a shove. “And modest too.” He commented, so very desperate to deny that Matty Healy was, in fact, the most beautiful boy he’d ever seen.

-

Friday was somber. Empty. With cracks in the glass. With scuffs upon the wood, and mud upon his shoes. George looked at Matty like he didn’t quite recognise him. Like a reflection obscured in a broken mirror.

Still neither boy had said a word. At least not one that mattered. Not one that referenced their conversations of days before. Not one that required any amount of daring to utter.

They remained. Silent. Scared. Shadows of what they’d lost to fate.

The night lay above them like a question mark, for uncertainty ran rampant through fields that feelings didn’t dare to venture into. For the truth lay thick like smoke: choking, and still enticing somehow.

“I told her, I’d-” Matty began, words falling limp between his lips.

George eyed him dubiously, glancing through the streets around them - perhaps the busiest they’d ever been, with all of two dozen people winding their way down the road. The two boys hardly caused much of a disturbance as they came to a halt in the middle of the road, staring across at one another with wide, hopeless eyes.

In silence, in glances, they asked each other questions that the night couldn’t answer for them. But their lips refused to cooperate; their limbs fell limp into a despondent nothingness that consumed their bodies.

“You told me you’d come.” George reminded him. Matty didn’t look like he needed reminding at all: guilt was brazen upon his face.

“I did.” Matty pulled his lips between his teeth. “But I told her too.”

George shook his head, letting the grey evening skies grow dark around them, losing Matty’s gaze amidst the smoke; he’d lose him to her if he had to. He just wouldn’t let Matty lose himself too; despite himself, that was simply something George wouldn’t stand for.

“Go with your  _ ‘girlfriend’ _ if you want to.” George dismissed him with a sigh, taking a step back as if to walk away, as if he didn’t care at all. It was quite the illusion; it took more than George could carry to maintain.

Matty gave a shrug: his eyes growing distant.

“But if you’d rather spend the night with me, then come on.” George narrowed his eyes at the clueless boy - so very lost up in his own head.

Despite George’s frantic gesturing, he remained still, stubborn. “It’s your decision, Matty. I can’t make it for you.”

“But you want to.” Matty bit back, knowingly.

George couldn’t subdue the smile that followed. “Yeah. Course. I want you to come with me, because I’d miss you otherwise. I’d miss you if you with her.” He drew his words out hesitantly: unsure as to whether they formed a plea or not: painting such a sorry picture of desperation that George feared sustaining.

“I’d miss you too.” Matty failed to bite back his words. “I don’t think she’d miss me.”

George thought to argue otherwise: to propose the fact that no one could ever  _ not  _ miss him, but came to realise that it would hardly be beneficial under the given circumstances.

In the end, he said nothing at all. He remained silent, motionless, as Matty’s eyes raked over his form: imploring, uttering words his lips dared not to speak.

The moment seemed to last forever. It was only until Matty pulled his lips out into a smile that time seemed to return to normal speed.

“Come on.” He brushed his fingers against George’s. “What about this party then?”

And suddenly, that was them.

That was them as the evening drew out: two boys lost somewhere in the space between their heads, making a way through evening streets to an uncertain destination.

George had began with the word ‘party’, but that told nothing about how the night might end. The both of them knew that well enough, in contrary to how George was constantly grounded with the somewhat overwhelming sensation that he didn’t know himself at all, and Matty simply had to agree that he knew George even less.

George focused on what he knew in place of what he didn’t. He focused on the artificial warmth of the streetlights: illuminating the evening, yet bringing hardly very much more than light to darkness. He focused on the shadows cast upon Matty’s face: a dusty pale complexion drawn out in shades of gold and brown. He looked ready to burn, almost consumed by flames, with embers lit within his eyes. George wished for a world in which he could reach deep within those eyes, deep within the boy to his right, and find himself too.

He wished for a world in which he was not always the one staring. A world in which the beautiful boy looked back. A world in which he had more to his name than the heretic circles he’d chased; the streets were scorned with his footsteps. For parts of him had come to die amidst the grit and gravel below.

He thought not of boys he’d ran from down the very road they travelled that night. He thought not of girls he’d left behind in empty morning houses, to dash down that very road. He thought not. But fixate, he did.

It was a kind of subconscious thinking: his mind twisting and turning of its own accord, unaware of the weight of Matty’s gaze upon his cheek as they fell back into silence - two shadows upon the same darkened road.

Matty had a million questions in his eyes: painted out in shades of golden brown. He caught his gaze and looked upon it like a mural, like a stained glass church window: centrepiece behind the altar, for he was every man in the pews, distant even as the priest’s words might boom and echo against the old wood and stone.

Matty held a million questions but George did not hold a million answers. In fact, George hardly held anything at all. George held: himself stern, along with his cool, and a packet of cigarettes in his pocket. Still, even in George’s wildest dreams, he was not the richest, most accomplished man in the world; for in those dreams, in his palm he held not the entire Earth, but simply Matty’s hand.

“You’re quiet now.” Matty grew uncomfortable with the silence, or perhaps just with the way George’s eyes drifted across his cheeks like headlights: staining them a fluorescent, burning amber.

George gave a nod, pulling his head away, losing dark eyes out amidst the inky blackness. But he feared not; they were barely a street away now, having taken the long way around. For George had lived and died to stare at Matty’s lips under the streetlights.

“And you’re not even going to say anything to that?” Matty mused: intrigued at best. He stared across at George like all he yearned to do was figure him out: to write his mind out within its entirety upon one sheet of paper. George stared back in warning: desperate to convey the notion that such a thing simply wasn’t possible, still he wasn’t sure whether that was true or not at all.

“So I’m doing the talking?” Matty inferred, smile settling comfortably upon his lips. He moved with the ease that George lacked, living the life that George regarded with wonder. They were incredibly distant people, bought unspeakably close, under conditions that never failed to confuse and wonder.

George, infatuated by the concept, gave him the honour of a quick nod, a fleeting gaze, eyes burning amber under street lights.

“You don’t want me to talk about Charlotte.” It wasn’t a difficult inference to make. “So I’m going to talk about Charlotte.” He continued with the kind of insistence that George had certainly not been counting on.

He raised an eyebrow at the boy: barely visible through the lowlight.

“Because if you want me to shut up, you’re going to have to talk back.” Matty curled a smirk up around his lips; he was clever, so much more than George - their playing field had never been even at all.

George shook his head, biting back a ‘not if I punch you first’, for if that remark slipped his lips, Matty had already won. And if George was certain about one thing, it was that he simply wouldn’t allow that.

“I think she might break up with me for ditching her.” Matty folded his arms across his chest. The air seemed to ring with silence.

Matty continued, unfazed. “It was supposed to be kind of important. I mean, to her, at least. Her best friend’s party. I was supposed to go as her date, so she can get pissed and kiss me and look socially superior because everyone thinks we’re going to shag in the spare rooms. But we’d never shag in the spare rooms. I don’t want to ever have sex with her again. I think her tits are fake… that’s not why I don’t want to- I’m not that superficial, I’m just… I don’t even know her friend’s name. Imagine going to the birthday party of someone you don’t even know the name of. Fucking mental. I swear her head’s not screwed on right. I swear mine isn’t either.”

George liked Matty’s rambling; the free flow of his mind, and in particular, the kind of genuine honesty that followed. He figured he could certainly tolerate this sort of chat about Charlotte, although it was wearing rather thin.

Matty shot a weak smile across at him; silent promises held with high regard, George gave little more than a nod in return. For, in truth, he was always more stubborn than Matty could have ever given him credit for.

“So I think she might break up with me for it. I wouldn’t blame her.” Matty took a moment: as if suddenly so aware of how nonchalant the whole affair sounded. “I’m kind of being a dickhead right now - ditching her.” 

George nodded: grin impossibly wide. Yet, Matty did little more than roll his eyes.

“That’d be alright though. Then I wouldn’t have to break up with her, and maybe after all this shit, she’d finally hate me enough to stop kissing me, so we wouldn’t have to get back together. And I wouldn’t have to look at her and pretend to be attracted to her anymore.”

George couldn’t help raising his eyebrows at that.

“But then people would start again. And her friends would definitely give me shit. Maybe I’d become _ ‘queer boy’ _ again. That’s what happened the first time we broke up - last year, yeah, I know, this shit’s gone on too long, but… she retaliated… quite… harshly.” Matty drew out a sigh, gaze hitting the floor.

‘Queer boy?’ George dared to ask, dared to scream, to curse Charlotte like she was the scum of the earth, but still he remained silent.

“I mean, I obviously must have been a fucking fag if I didn’t want to sleep with her.” Matty caught himself the moment he’d really realised what he’d said. “Sorry.” He muttered, blinking far too fast, and far too much.

George hardly reacted; the truth was that he’d heard so much worse over the years, especially directed at him. And in earnest, he liked his silence, he liked the lack of obligation to respond.

“It kind of fucked with me.” Matty admitted, sinking his teeth into his bottom lip. “I know it’s not as bad for me because I’m not gay. I know. I’ve thought a lot about what you said and you’re right, course you’re right. I mean, you’re definitely the authority when it comes to sexuality, being… what you are…” He gestured wildly, as if, still, the word half-scared him.

George watched with wide, impatient eyes: set intent to burn a response from Matty’s tongue. Eventuality took hold, and Matty forced the word from his lips, cheeks flushed red. “ _ Bisexual _ .”

George gave a nod.

Matty was almost relieved to continue. “But it fucked with me. I guess after people yell ‘gay’ and ‘fag’ at you day in and day out, you kind of start to wonder if you are. So I took her back.” He drew out a sigh.

George watched him from behind wide eyes; struggling to chase any sort of sense from Matty’s explanations.

“I took her back because I didn’t even want to… entertain the possibility.” Matty drew out a sigh, eyes distant as they approached what was instantly made clear to be the liveliest house in the town. “I have to ensure that she won’t get back together with me… or else… I’m not… going anywhere…”

George’s breath caught in his throat as their destination drew near; simultaneously, he yearned for their feet to be right on the doorstep, and for thousands of miles to stretch out between them and the party. He wasn’t quite sure what to think at all.

“I’m talking too much.” Matty cursed himself, cheeks burning red as he shook his head. “Never be silent again. I think I need you… to speak. I think, I can’t take staring into your eyes and trying to guess what you’re making of me.”

George curled his lips up into a smile: as comforting as comforting could get. “We’re here now, anyway.” His voice, softer than he’d remembered it, graced the evening air.

Matty flushed harder. “I’ve missed your voice.”

George hide his face amidst the shadows, hesitating before they could approach the house. “Maybe I’ve missed it too. You know? Being able to tell you that…” George trailed off; he didn’t know what he’d wanted to tell Matty.

The younger boy came to a halt with him: eyebrows poised high on his forehead. “Tell me what?” Curiosity was soon to get the better of both of them.

George shrugged out from under Matty’s gaze. He made a stab at brave, at calm, at nonchalant, but all fell through. “Maybe you’ll have to find out.” His words held much more of a questioning tone in the end: flimsy and false - they saw it through it, the both of them, but neither said a word.

“Alright.” Matty wore a smile, and god, he wore it well. “Let’s see.” It seemed like a challenge, shot from the blistering amber flames set alight in his eyes.

George watched this beautiful,  _ beautiful _ boy for a long moment that evening, and wondered if there was always more. For if he was not a boy but a piece of paper folded over a million times, loaded with a series of secrets George could never quite manage to unravel.

“Come on.” He snapped out of it: holding himself stern, and leading Matty up over the driveway and to an unfamiliar front door.

It came open with a push of George’s palm, revealing a world bright, burning - the most ardent flame of life and love from the inside. People, and stories, and drugs, and drink, and pretty girls, and pretty boys, and kisses, and spare rooms - all there for the taking.

And yet, George could only ever look to his right.

George could only ever see the boy beside him: curls fanned out like a golden halo in the breeze. He shivered a little; George ushered him inside.

The party was loud. The kind of loud that was instantly overwhelming: leaving them as two simple skeletons, shaking as they stood consumed with the sounds of music that neither boy could recognise, entwined with the drifts of conversation as the world crept forward, settling down and making a home between them.

Still, through the noise, through the mess of the crowds, they could only find each other’s eyes. George took the lead: guiding Matty through the crowds, catching eyes with strangers and shaking heads, until they reached a smaller room, a calmer room - one in which they could stay together.

For the lost look in Matty’s eyes was unmissable; he wasn’t good with parties, was he? George should have known. George simply wished he could look upon the boy and tell himself that he knew a thing at all. For the unfortunate truth was that he was rather lost. They were, at least, lost there together, but lost nonetheless.

Matty offered George a smile. George offered Matty a cigarette.

He took it, gladly.

As Matty fumbled with his lighter, cigarette held loosely between his lips, George lead him around the few people that had situated themselves in the kitchen. They were, for the most part, too enthralled with the matters of stealing liquor from the unspecified owners of the place, to pay Matty and George any notice; it was something the pair could find a certain sort of relief in.

“You feeling alright?” George made a nod to the wary look in Matty’s eyes as he cranked the window open, allowing a cool evening breeze to penetrate the room, before sitting himself on the tiled floor beneath the window.

It was hardly the world’s most luxurious of seats, but Matty joined him nonetheless: misjudging his descent and ending up with half of his knee spilling over into George’s lap. Yet, funnily enough, neither boy particularly seemed to mind.

“Yeah.” Matty’s response was delayed, but George didn’t seem at all fussed, throwing his head back against the wall, and letting the music - still loud from next door - reverberate through the plaster. The walls vibrated with sufficient force that George began to worry that the place might fall down, and he wasn’t the one that lived there.

“Do you want to find Chelsea or Jesse or someone?” Matty asked, eyeing George carefully, as his eyes continued to dart around the room.

A smile caught George by surprise: forever unable to quite pin Matty down. He watched the boy smoke for just a minute more.

“Why?” George inquired, in a calm kind of passive voice that didn’t sound a thing like him; Matty looked at him with wonder, and not just that, but good reason too.

“Why?” Matty returned, eyebrows curving back and forth as if they struggled in a plight to remove themselves from his forehead.

“I mean…” George toyed with his words, biting his lip, trying to draw out the evening in a way that made sense. For his head made anything but; back in the other room were his friends, were the drugs, were boys and girls who wouldn’t say no to him, who wouldn’t look up at him with wide, terrified eyes. And yet, here was Matty, and here he was. No more than a cigarette between them, yet content.

“Do you want to?” George continued, running shaking fingers back through his hair. “Find them, I mean.” He added, as if it needed making much clearer.

“Not really, no.” Matty drew out a sigh, watching as the group of older boys, now satisfied with the alcohol they’d acquired, stumbled back out into the front room, letting the world, the music, people, at full volume, catch them for just a brief second, before the door clicked shut again.

“Kind of just like to be here with you.” Matty dared to let such a confession slip his lips. George’s insides turned to mush: cheeks burning the kind of red he struggled to hide. His thoughts didn’t fit a sober brain; he stared back across the kitchen and wondered for a brief, stupid moment, whether the boys had left any drink behind.

“Me too.” George admitted, eyes to the ground.

He watched Matty’s fingers reach down to the tiles, tracing their seams. He thought, for a stupid, brief moment, what it would be like to have those gentle, delicate fingertips trace his skin like that.

That was when George decided that he definitely couldn’t stand this sober. He’d been high earlier, but the mere thought of Matty was entirely sobering; so much so, that George began to fear just what his presence was doing to him.

It was as if George’s thoughts were strung out like tangibly like lines of thread, for within seconds, Matty had reached out and latched himself upon one. He followed George’s eyes to the cabinets. “Would it be bad if we took something to drink?”

“Yeah.” George told him: smile curling in over his lips. “Very bad. Atrocious. The most cardinal of sins.”

Matty stared at him blankly for a minute before giving in, with a roll of his eyes and a twitch of his lips.

“I say though, fuck rules, fuck good and bad, fuck supposed to do. Let’s have a fucking drink.” George stumbled to his feet, as if drunk on the notion, or just upon that hungry look to Matty’s eyes; George had almost convinced himself it was want, or something equally as disconcerting as that.

“Yeah.” Matty agreed, albeit with significantly less vigour. “Let’s have a fucking drink.”

George didn’t need telling twice: crossing the room in what seemed like seconds, and fumbling through the cupboards, until the one containing liquor finally presented itself to him. From the boys doing, it was rather sparse, but still, George reckoned they’d manage.

“Any preference?” George called back across to Matty. “There’s some beer, there’s some wine… there’s some… gin…”

“White or red?” Matty asked, catching George a little by surprise. “The wine.”

“Red.” George supplied, removing the bottle from the cabinet and holding it out for Matty to examine. “Seriously?” He asked, turning back to face the slightly flushed boy, curled up, cigarette in hand, at the other side of the room.

“What?” Matty cocked an eyebrow, stretching skinny, almost delicate, little legs out across the tiled floor.

“Isn’t wine supposed to be a woman’s drink?” George’s tone was playful, smile mocking, still Matty couldn’t help but blush a little, rolling his eyes.

“Well, I’ll have you know…” Matty trailed off, steadying himself against the wall as he got to his feet. “I’m a very classy lady.”

George rolled his eyes with far too much force, setting the bottle down on the countertop. “Classy lady?”

“What? Am I not classy, do you not think?” Matty stubbed out his cigarette, approaching George with a certain kind of spark in his eyes.

“No, you’re definitely not a lady, though.” George turned his lips up into a grin, opening the bottle, before turning to the cupboards in search of glasses.

Matty rolled his eyes, and forever the classiest of ladies, took a swig, downing a good quarter of the bottle in one go. George turned back: eyes blown wide and fixated upon those lips, stained red. 

In his mind, it was his tongue, not Matty’s, licking the stain from them. 

George grimaced, and reached back up to the cupboard, producing a bottle of vodka, and similarly taking a swig. That however, didn’t go quite so well, leaving him to grimace and splutter as he tried to keep it down.

“Amateur.” Matty commented, turning back to the wine. 

George stared back at those lips: stretched out around the top of the bottle. Something inside him yearned and keened out towards this boy - this beautiful clueless boy that his heart in such a mess.

George knew it would be a bad idea to kiss him. Especially again. He doubted a second time was something he could make such an adequate excuse for. And still, he wasn’t stupid enough to imagine that the bottle of vodka wouldn’t compromise his emotions a little more, yet regardless of that, regardless of anything, George kept drinking.

They ended up nestled back under the windowsill in the end. With Matty’s head against George’s shoulder, and his heart thumping whenever their fingers brushed. It was perhaps then that George accepted that he was beyond well and truly fucked.

“You know… Charlotte.” 

Matty started again as the room truly grew dark, and fingertips slipped around bottles. Their words were slurred and their heads were heavy, and still the noise continued on, almost barricading them in there, together.

George thought to protest. George thought to scream and cry otherwise, George thought to kiss him, and never stop kissing him until he well and truly shut up. Yet George did no such thing.

George remained silent. George nodded. George let the air settle in around them: like grains of sound, counting out the time, like dust.

“I don’t think I  _ can _ love her.” Matty’s words had slurred and merged amidst the space between his head and his tongue - truthfully, it was quite the space to get lost in.

George regarded him oddly, even in his drunken state, even amidst the mess they’d made for themselves, up in their heads.

“Why not?” Curiosity got the better of him in the end.

Matty shrugged, slouching further, his whole body growing limp as curls spooled out into George’s lap. Before George entirely knew what was happening, this beautiful,  _ beautiful _ boy was staring up at him. With eyes wide: brown, unblinking. He forever yearned to figure him out.

Matty stretched his arms out across the floor adjacent, running gentle fingertips across the cool tiling. In George’s ears, the music still echoed: the world outside lay waiting in the other room; he wondered if Jesse had noticed his absence, if Chelsea had missed him, if a single thought had been spared. For in that moment, with Matty’s head in his lap, George felt entirely removed from reality.

“I don’t really know.” Matty mused, lips moving and twitching idly. “But it’s like I can’t. There’s a physical… thing… it’s like… there’s walls. Between this, and loving her, and I don’t think she put those walls up. I mean, I blamed her, but it’s not her fault. I think they’re my walls, I think they’re mine. And I… can’t tear them down if I don’t- but I don’t even know if I want to- like maybe they’re the walls to my house or something, and I, I live in them, I am safe - I don’t need her to come in. I don’t want to fall in love with her. Not really. I know I can’t. I know I won’t. I think maybe I’m even okay with that.”

George’s thoughts ran on like trains: clearing a path through the night, passing the world by at impossible speeds. With all the courage in the world, he chose one carefully, and dared to hop right upon it.

“You can’t love her?” He repeated aloud. “I mean… how do you know? What is the difference between not being  _ able _ to love her and not  _ wanting _ to love her?”

Matty looked a lot like he’d reached a dead end, but with time, with a few minutes, he parted the silence once more.

“Because there’s a difference. It can’t be helped. it’s not I don’t want to love her because she’s a bitch, or she blackmailed me last year, or she’s not actually got very nice tits, or any bullshit like that…” Matty slurred his words forever, wine getting the better of him.

“Oh…” George gave a nod, still not fully certain he understood, but unsure as to whether that was on his or Matty’s part. He watched, instead, as Matty sat up, falling back awkwardly between George’s legs, and reached for the bottle.

He took another swig, wiping his mouth before George could look. And for the minute that followed, drunk on more than just drink, George stared at Matty, and Matty stared back.

“It’s a bit… I don’t understand, but fucking hell, George.” Matty punctuated his sentence with a swig of wine. He didn’t wipe his lips that time. “I don’t think I can love her because she’s a girl.”

George’s heart thudded in his chest: suddenly yearning for a sober head, for all, in that minute, George could do, was stare back. Eyes wide. Terrified. He stared back at the beautiful boy who’d made such a mockery of him. Still, he’d let him.

“Fuck her.” Matty repeated, what were essentially George’s words. “I can’t love her… why should I care… I…”

Drunken, heavy-lidded eyes flickered down to his lips. And then, before George could even quite recall his own name, Matty’s lips pressed against his own.

And George felt the wine. Felt it stain his lips too: marked and pliant in Matty’s arms. This was distinctly not how he’d ever once imagined it to be, and yet, yet here they were. Here it was. This was everything - whatever everything was yet to mean.

Drunk on something more than vodka and wine.

-


	6. "is that not enough?"

In George’s head, it was already summer. For spring flowers, having lain dainty and beautiful in contrasting shades of pure white and obscene pink, had bloomed into rich, ripe fruit: sickly sweet against his lips.

The sun’s beatings were relentless, and rather unheard of for the time of year, yet still, as they lay together, through early mornings and endless nights, Matty would always comment upon the way George’s chest was beginning to tan. They were soft words, uttered secretively against bare skin, bronze only under the sun’s light, uttered by lips, stretched out in shades of pink and red, like the most lascivious of summer fruits.

Yet in Matty’s head, summer had long passed them by. By his reckoning alone, the summer sun had torn the floorboards from beneath their feet within minutes, and all that lay before them was an inevitable descent into the leering haze of autumn.

Still, warmth grasped the air. Warmth grasped Matty firmly by the hand and refused to let go. He looked at George, when the cold came in - an unforgiving breeze - and wondered when it was that they would talk about things.

It had been three days. And yet, spring, summer, and autumn had long passed them by. Yet, George still stared at him with that starstruck look in his eyes, like this was a long summer night, laid out under the stars. Matty yearned for such an imagination, such an illusion, such a high - to stare up at a cracked, yellowing ceiling, and see the stars, see constellations in more than spiders’ webs and patterns of dust.

The house had grown on him. Just not in the way he would have liked. Matty ought to have expected nothing less; everything under the roof had been forever reversed, as if upon the doorway, he crossed the threshold into another world. Into another land, in which it was not 1985, but perhaps some time beyond that, some time beyond them entirely.

Matty wondered how long it might be - until the world stopped caring who it was you lay with at night.

He turned on his head, wound up in the sheets, thoughts thrown out in an irretrievable mess: to mingle and merge with the particles of dust in the stale air. But Matty thought fuck his thoughts - he didn’t want them back; he didn’t dare to go collect them. The house didn’t seem quite so friendly anymore - that was thing; he thought maybe now, it had always been George.

Long shadows cut across the room, tearing dark lines across their faces: leaving George’s eyes obscured as he pressed his head down into the pillows, safely in shadow. Still, he was at peace - in this house, in this world, in their god awful situation. Matty was still yet to figure him out.

The dim, amber glow of the rugged, halfway antique lamp on the bedside table, cast what seemed to pose as golden ripples across George’s chest; Matty traced them, with fingertips so soft, and so pale that they seemed entirely ethereal. He didn’t belong in this house at all.

He sat up. Curls fanned out in a languid cascade down into their usual position - plenty rebelled, sticking up with the kind of defiance and wickedly whimsical nonsense that caught Matty alight. He reached upwards, stopping just for a moment before tentatively patting them down, for the feeling of treachery in doing so rang shrill through his bones.

That same wickedly whimsical nonsense: Matty reeked of it. 

This house seemed to be entirely constructed from it. For truly, none of its inhabitants could hardly dream a world in which they might live a long and happy life within its walls. The truth, however, had become increasingly apparent - that was not the matter of concern.

The yellowing walls commanded not whole lifespans, not great overbearing futures, but instead single moments, snapshots of lives. And the people who slept within them, revelled in that: alive only in glimpses, only in moments, regarding the future as entirely irrelevant.

It was truly an odd concept for Matty to grasp. It kept him upright, eyes blown wide, bouncing off the shadows cast upon the walls.

Although, he never made it at all apparent that he sat waiting for something, for anything at all, fate was ultimately disinterested, and in turn, limbo came crashing down like a great beast upon the two. It was then, amidst the darkness, that Matty caught George’s eyes, and their precious silence fell into fate’s hands.

“ _ I  _ kissed  _ you _ .”

Upon the wings of Matty’s words - diaphanous and skeletal in nature - the two boys found themselves transported back to that kitchen. To the music throbbing through their veins with sufficient vigour to overthrow their pulses and capsize their heartbeats.

“You did.” George’s chest rose and fell with the calm, yet unpredictable pace of the tides; night-light ripple waves cast worthy shadows across his chest.

“And that time it wasn’t wrong?” Matty was still not entirely sure, if his words posed a question or not. “There was no ‘you shouldn’t have kissed me’.” He was entirely astute in his observation.

“Can I really tell you what  _ you _ should and shouldn’t do?” George propped himself up onto his elbows, positioning his shoulders back against the headboard so his face was no longer obscured in shadow.

“ _ You _ shouldn’t have kissed me because I had a girlfriend, and all that bullshit, and so we had to ignore it completely and let it linger like this great formidable beast that it never had the right to be, but when  _ I  _ kissed you, and I’ve still got the fucking girlfriend - by the way - that’s all entirely fine. And you can drag me off home and try to talk me into having  _ sex _ with you?”

George couldn’t help but chuckle at such an accusation. He sat up further, holding Matty’s gaze, deemed forever beautiful under the warm light.

“It was your decision this time. Is it my right to make your decisions for you?” He raised an eyebrow. “No, course it isn’t.”

Matty rolled his eyes. “What like…  _ ushering _ me into getting you off isn’t?”

George shook his head. “You don’t have to. You’re not. If you had to, we would have already, but no- despite popular belief, I am actually a decent human being.” Matty couldn’t help but snort at that.

“I’ve still got a girlfriend, though.” Matty bit back a sigh, stealing a glance at George - beautiful in bed beside him. “This is wrong.”

George sat up properly,  creating a dip in the bed in which Matty couldn’t help but fall into - at least, he’d blamed it on the dip, anyway. He brushed down the last of Matty’s uneven curls, and kissed him - gently, just for a moment. Still, it lingered with the kind of feeling that Matty was unable to comprehend - this, between George and him, it was truly something else.

“I thought you were straight back then, anyway.” He struggled to bite back another smile, bringing a broad, almost somewhat tarnished, finger up to brush against Matty’s cheek.

The word ‘straight’ lingered like a sour taste upon Matty’s tongue; he dared not to repeat it, to let it command the room once more. Yet, however, George had not needed a single word from him to distinguish quite how he could feel.

“Or whatever. Anyway.” George’s tone grew bitter, finger yanked away from Matty’s face. There was a distinct ache to Matty’s chest; the overbearing feeling that he’d fucked this all up.

“So what is this? What do we do, because we- I can’t stay in this house forever - as much as you’d  _ like _ me to, I-… I have a life outside of it-“

“And what?” George’s laugh was wild, like one you might have expected from a rabid dog. “I  _ don’t _ ?” Matty’s cheeks flushed red, still, George didn’t seem all that offended.

“That’s not what I meant.” Matty’s words grew stern: heavy in his chest. 

“I know.” George ushered his concern away with a sigh, falling back down against the mattress and closing his eyes - it seemed much more like a promise as opposed to any sort of conviction.

Matty remained silent, bolt upright, concern wavering out into the night time air.

“Pick.” A great boom in the place of George’s voice came to command the silence in the end. “It’s simple.”

For Matty, it was anything but so.

George’s clarification appeared almost painstaking upon his part. “Me or her.” It was then that Matty could understand why.

“That’s what you’ve got to do -  _ pick _ . She’s your girlfriend, or I’m your- we have this  _ thing _ … and we see what goes from there.” George buried his head against the pillow. “Not both. I’m not having that, alright?”

Matty’s face grew pale, grave. “Alright.” He trembled, hesitant yet to fall back to sleep.

“Not until the morning, though.” George muttered, perhaps as an afterthought. He reached a hand out in Matty’s vaguely direction. “Come here, come back. Let me kiss you again.”

Despite George’s saccharine tongue, despite everything repulsive the world had put into this boy, his words lapped around him like waves, and he, with time, lay upon the shore.

George kissed him, as promised, curled up together, away from the light. Matty let him - with all he had left.

“You’re beautiful. I don’t get to kiss beautiful boys. I’m savouring the moment, making the most of the opportunity. Not that you’re an opportunity - you’re so much more than that.” George whispered his words like excuses against Matty’s neck.

Matty let out a whine in disagreement: struggling to see things to be quite so. He felt George regard him, as if there might have been something wrong up in his head. Truthfully, Matty didn’t doubt such a possibility at all.

“I kissed one.” George confessed, into adam’s apple, breath warm as it tickled Matty’s throat. “Before. Once.”

This was impossibly wrong; Matty reminded himself. He tried to think about Charlotte, but despite his every effort, he struggled to properly picture her face.

“His name was Henry.” George uttered it as if it were foreign: unfamiliar upon his tongue. 

Matty lay awake, amidst the midnight shadows, and allowed himself to wonder what this beautiful boy named Henry had done.

“Only he could kiss me. He never liked it when I kissed him.” George’s voice grew quiet, words trembling as if they might fall from some unspecified great height. “Like I was the toy that had suddenly come to life. No one wants their punching bag to punch back.” He snorted, leaving Matty unsure as to what portion of his words rang at all true.

“You’re not.” Matty insisted, voice small, soft, but inexplicably adamant. “You’re not that. Whatever he thought you were.”

George managed a smile, seemingly disinterested in Matty’s response. “That’s the thing with beautiful boys. You look at them like they have the world, and god they do. You curse yourself knowing they’ll never stare back, but perhaps that’s the worst possibility of all. What do you give someone who has it all? What do you tell someone who’s heard it all before? Nothing.”

Matty wasn’t quite sure he knew how to answer that.

“But I’m not nothing. I don’t want to be your fucking nothing. And sometimes, I don’t trust that you’re much different.” There was a malice to George’s words that neither boy had expected.

When he was young, Matty’s mother had told him, as most mothers do, if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all - and hence came the silence. A night, finally more than just a moment, a room more than just light, and shadow, and desperate shapes.

Yet just as eyelids grew heavy, as the darkness began to cave in, sleep offering up its unruly, cloaked fingertips, George parted his lips.

Soft and slow, somewhat of a confession escaped him.

“In the morning… please prove me wrong.”

-

Night became morning, and morning became afternoon. An afternoon in which Matty sat alone, behind familiar walls - the presentable, homely, type -  and didn’t cry. Not at all. Not one bit.

There were a million things that Matthew Healy absolutely shouldn’t have done, yet this really did reign supreme. The whole endeavour: in all of its corrupt glory. From the innocent decision to spend the night with George, to the drink, to the kiss, to George’s lips burning holes into his mind, holes that could never be covered.

Above that all, he should never have left with the decision he’d made; he should never have faced the world head on, he should have never let himself cry - let those wretched tears curse his cheeks. Then beyond that, he should have never let Adam and Ross in. Not just emotionally, but Matty stood in his kitchen, knuckles turning white as he braced himself against the countertop, as he regretted ever opening his front door for the two boys.

He looked at them, sometimes, although now more than ever, and found himself overwhelmed by the definitive feeling that he’d lost something, or at least that there’d been something lost between the two of them, for Matty looked at his best friends, and saw little more than strangers with familiar eyes.

Too long was spent - thrown away, desperate to figure out exactly whether it had been him or it had been them that had changed.

“Why weren’t you at school today?” Ross asked, pacing back and forth through the kitchen like he owned it, like Matty’s entire property, like Matty’s entire head, was something he had undeniable right to.

Matty scoffed in response, head ducked down, eyes boring into the sink, catching his rather depressingly ashen reflection upon one of the taps.

“We were a bit worried.” Adam added, with noticeably less urgency; it wasn’t that Adam cared  _ less _ , it was just that he cared significantly less vehemently.

“I mean, you’re just growing more and more  _ distant _ , and I-” Matty didn’t even let Ross finish that time; he’d heard it all a thousand times before, throughout his head and his dreams.

“And…” Adam chose that moment to assert himself; he did however, offer up the only bit of truth that Matty could regard as at all interesting. “Charlotte’s like…  _ really _ pissed at you…”

“You weren’t off  _ because _ of her?” Ross’ eyes began to burn, as if he regarded the notion with the weight of cardinal sin. “Were you?” He demanded, voice growing all the more urgent by the second.

Matty could tell he was entirely dissatisfied with the general state of disinterest he was faced with; yet, that only compelled him to keep up the facade. His head worked in funny ways sometimes, more so lately; the notion amused him, at least until he could make sense of it. The truth was, it was a George thing to do; fucking  _ George Daniel _ was rubbing off on him and not in the way George had been quite so keen on.

The world burned white. Matty wanted out, or a drink, or a smoke, or a kitchen filled with less judgemental gazes. For Ross looked prepared to cut a hole in Matty’s chest in order to fit his own version of his heart inside. Matty wondered if that might have fixed his problems, and if he knew so, whether he would let him.

“You  _ were _ .” Ross drew out a sigh, pushing Adam aside and pressing his head against the fridge.

Matty gave a shrug, daring to meet Adam’s gaze just for the briefest of moments.

“It’s over, by the way.” Adam added, the perfect picture of nonchalance. “Charlotte said so. I wasn’t sure if you  _ knew _ …” He trailed off, looking back and forth between Ross and Matty hesitantly. “I mean, you seem pretty…  _ content _ with it.”

Still, Matty shrugged, flattening down stray curls as he wondered how he might care to explain his current situation at all. 

“She kissed some other guy last night.” Adam continued, in the others’ silence. “Thought maybe you might want to know…” He trailed off: unable to do much but view the situation that surrounded him as completely unreadable. 

Matty bit back a ‘so did I’ and shrugged.

“Do you  _ really _ not care?” Ross stared Matty down in little more than pure astonishment. “Like not even a little bit?”

“I never liked her.” Matty had no qualms with making that clear.

“Okay…” Ross trailed off, having significantly fewer issues with that as opposed to everything else. “Then  _ why _ were you with her?”

“You’re not the first person who’s asked me that, you know?” Matty couldn’t help himself: cheeks flushing as he gave himself that moment, that moment alone to think of George, to think of that smile, to think of those eyes, to think of his every word and what it could mean.

“Who was it?” Adam snorted, amused by the prospect of Matty discussing his relationships with someone other than Ross - simply for the impact it made, clear, and burning red upon Ross’ face.

“Tell them they had the right idea.” Ross snapped: voice erratic and gravelly, deeper than usual. “There’s someone sensible in your life at least.”

Matty gave a great bark of a laugh. It was again, awfully reminiscent of a certain boy who he’d left sleeping that morning. The boy he’d left without a response, the boy with the question that still rang out clear through his veins.

“Maybe not?” Adam commented, arching his eyebrows as he looked once more between Matty and Ross.

“You want to know who told me that first?” The question was pointless; Matty already well knew that Ross did. Still, he teased him, holding the information just a little way out of reach, just perhaps, to fuck with his head.

“ _ Yeah _ .” Ross looked awfully close to spitting out demands at him. Matty reckoned, that it would have at least, held some sort of substance to it.

“George Daniel.” Matty twisted his name through his lips like a song: fully aware of the effect it would have on the two boys. He was just playing with them now, but guilt was yet to make itself apparent.

“Fucking hell.” Ross cut to the chase, crossing the kitchen to stare Matty down with disbelief. “What the absolute  _ fuck _ has he got do with your relationships? And how the fuck would you talk to him about what’s going on between you and Charlotte before you’d dare to mention it to us?”

Matty could think of several hundred reasons, yet not a single one that was at all appropriate to utter aloud.

And silence didn’t serve him nearly as well as he’d hoped.

“Come on, Matty is this  _ it _ ?” Adam even began to properly side with Ross at that point; that was perhaps when Matty knew he’d gone too far - still, he could never be sure.

“Yeah.” Matty threw his eyes down to floor. 

“Fucking hell.” Ross found such an exclamation rather comforting amidst everything else.

“I was with George this weekend.” Matty wasn’t entirely sure why he’d felt at all inclined to tell the truth; it was something along the lines of feeling sorry for Ross.

“ _ All weekend _ ?” Adam’s eyes grew wide. “Like you-”

“You spent forty eight hours with George Daniel…?  _ Voluntarily _ …?” Ross struggled to believe it, staring Matty down, unsure as to what had replaced his best friend, and just who stood before him.

“He’s nice.” Matty perhaps wouldn’t have specifically picked  _ ‘nice’ _ as a word to describe George Daniel, but it served its purpose. “If you get to know him.”

“Why would you  _ want _ to?” Adam watched Matty carefully, not with the same adamant disgust as Ross did, but with much more of a hint of genuine curiosity.

“Because maybe he doesn’t make the biggest shitshow out of every tiny little thing. And maybe he’s got the guts to tell things to me as they are, not wading around with all this ‘you’re worrying us’ bullshit.” Matty knew, before he’d even opened his mouth, that he shouldn’t have said it.

Both boys remained entirely silent: forever yet to figure out what remained of Matty Healy.

“He’s not what you think he is.” Matty continued, voice growing softer. “So you can stop making fucking stupid prejudiced judgements about people. Because Charlotte’s going to spread a lot of nasty bullshit about me now - are you going to believe that as well?”

The boys made quite a show out of shaking their heads.

Matty drew in a sigh and desperately tried to imagine a world in which he hadn’t also managed to sincerely fuck things up with George - he couldn’t quite manage it.

“What  _ happened _ with you and Charlotte?” Ross’ eyes softened, yet his words did not: remaining rampant and fierce in manners Matty didn’t care to explore.

“She decided that she loved me. She didn’t. I decided that I didn’t want to put up with that anymore. Be some pretty boy she could string on her arm at parties. I decided I wanted to think for myself, so I went to a party with George instead, and we got drunk, and we had a great time.”

Adam couldn’t help but snort at Matty’s use of the term ‘pretty boy’. Ross raised his eyebrows: unsure what to make of it.

“Pretty boy sounds…” He trailed off: uncertain, nervous - Matty could see it.

“A lot like something George Daniel would say.” Adam finished, snorting; Matty grimaced a little, dreading where this could be going. “You know rumour is he’s queer?”

“Yeah.” Ross added, clinging to Adam’s point rather desperately. “He fucking tell you that when you were unravelling your entire life story for him?”

Matty drew his lips out into a smile: forced, and thin, and generally so very unpleasant.

“Yes.” He clarified, eyes boring holes into Ross’ resolve. “He did.”

Neither Ross nor Adam really knew what to say to that, or to the entirely unfazed look in Matty’s eyes.

“He’s bisexual, actually.” Matty thought it best to correct them, perhaps just to break the silence.

“Bisexual?” Ross raised an eyebrow, glancing at Adam, and then back at Matty. Adam only shrugged.

“You sure he’s not hitting on you?” Adam raised the point, leaving Matty to consider how he might answer that without downright lying.

Because the truth was that Matty was sure - very sure, in fact, that George Daniel was absolutely hitting on him. He just wasn’t sure whether he was hitting on him back, and quite whether he had the guts to do so at all. He didn’t even have the guts to give him an answer; Matty reckoned that said an awful lot about him.

Matty gave a very Adam like shrug, eyes cutting holes into Ross’ chest.

“What are you  _ gay _ or something?” Ross snapped, posing it less like a question and more like an insult; Matty shivered a little, feeling more like George than ever.

Matty shook his head ‘no’, too uncertain of himself to bring the matter to words.

“Or bisexual?” Adam offered, considering Matty with the same kind of curiosity as before - there seemed to be significantly less insistence to his words; Ross, however seemed rather adamant to make his own mind up about Matty’s sexuality.

Matty shook his head once more, because truthfully, he wasn’t bisexual, he wasn’t gay, but just as much as he wasn’t straight. For Matty simply didn’t have a clue anymore; his head was fixed on George’s eyes in the moonlight, golden ripples of waves across his bare chest, his voice low and muffled in the morning, on the world he’d left behind, on the answer he’d omitted, on what George could possibly think of him anymore.

“Come back to school tomorrow.” Ross relented in the end, dropping everything else, despite how much it seemed to pain him.

Matty shrugged: a silent maybe.

“Please.” Adam offered. “We’ve missed you, and I’ve got history tomorrow, and I really don’t think I could cope with it by myself.”

It was perhaps, for that comment, and that comment alone, that made Matty give in, with a smile, hesitant, but so very much there, and gave a nod. For it seemed to frame itself as something like a last hope that his friends could indeed view him as more than a self-destructive charity case, who owed himself to them, simply just for existing.

Because if Matty Healy was anything at sixteen, it certainly wasn’t that.

He’d ushered them away in the end, on the excuse of having to go out to work, although actually seeing his shift through to the end was perhaps the last thing Matty intended to do that afternoon.

Guilt took him down the journey at least, dragging unwilling footsteps down deserted lanes. It was going to kill him, he reckoned - living in this town any longer, living with these people any longer, looking bullshit in the eye and letting the world accept it as truth.

What did it matter anyway? What was this all worth anymore? It wasn’t even that Matty’s heart wasn’t in it - it was instead that Matty’s heart was long gone entirely.

It had vacated his chest and set up camp elsewhere, and Matty just wasn’t quite sure how he ought to go about coaxing it back between his ribs. He wondered for a brief moment, for a terribly dangerous moment, whether he’d simply left his heart back in that house with George.

He was unsure as to whether it could have been George himself that had pried it from Matty’s chest as he slept, preparing to tuck it away or perhaps fashion it onto some sort of chain to hang around his neck. Or perhaps it had been the house, with all of its will and its frenzy; Matty doubted that a  _ house _ could steal his heart, but he came to recollect how he had indeed doubted just about  _ everything _ before he had crossed the its threshold.

The third option was the most intriguing of all, and that was of course, the possibility that he, himself, had simply dropped his heart, leaving it behind him upon the pillow when he’d left so early that morning. As much as the idea did concern Matty, he certainly couldn’t doubt its prevalence, as through everything that they’d endured, that sounded an awful lot like something Matty would do.

He stared inside the bookstore through the shop window, searching for someone on the other side, someone whose silhouette just might fit George’s, but instead the shadows lay vast and shapeless. He couldn’t find it within himself to bother; to work a shop that hardly anyone came to - the world could survive without him for that evening.

It was as Matty turned away from the shop and set off back home that his head began to hammer, almost as if his brain was rocking back and forth inside his skull. For the realisation dawned upon him with urgency - this was not the way home.

Matty had lived here, in the same shitty little house, all sixteen years of his life, and yet where his feet were so determined to take him was not at all in the direction of home. It took a while before it hit him, and longer before Matty thought to stop himself; he was content, it seemed, with simply walking in no particular destination.

Of course, however, his feet knew  _ exactly _ where they were going, and  _ exactly _ what he was ought to do. Matty wondered, sometimes, if he ought to just hand his body over to his subconscious, for it had consistently seemed to have a much better grasp on what to do with himself than he did.

Really, it made sense. The kind of sense that came crashing with the realisation of it all; the kind of sense that brought you to laugh at yourself for somehow skipping over it; the kind of sense that had forever eluded Matty.

He was going, of course, to get his heart back. From George, or from the house itself, his chest was beginning to feel rather lonely.

Matty didn’t escape without worry, free from concern that meeting George again might not be the best of ideas, considering the circumstances upon which he had left that morning. In earnest, such worries plagued his mind for the entirety of the journey, yet his mind seemed to be anything but in control that afternoon. And his feet, they certainly held no such concern.

Despite the trust Matty had put into the house, despite the sort of relationship he found had formed between himself and the disheveled, unruly, mismatched building (he’d found they had a lot in common), things seemed to frame themselves rather differently that evening.

Hesitance wasn’t something he hadn’t expected, it was just nothing he’d prepared for. In truth, however, Matty hadn’t prepared a thing; he knew not what to say to whoever might open the door, he knew not what to make of himself, or what George had made of him. Perhaps the only knowledge Matty could cling to was the fact that just as he had last night, and that morning, he didn’t know what he ought to do with himself anymore.

Matty’s fist moved of its own accord in the end. It seemed his body had gotten rather tired of waiting for him; as much as Matty was startled by the gesture, he couldn’t find it within himself to blame it.

The knocking of his knuckles against the chipped wood of the front door seemed to echo around his head for time immeasurable. Matty could have counted centuries in the time it took for him to knock, and then pull his fist back down to his side, curling it into the pocket of his jeans.

It was perhaps  _ millennia  _ until someone, anyone, saw fit to answer the door. 

Matty was in two minds regarding who he hoped to see on the other side, for as much as he desperately wanted avoid George for the rest of his life, he knew that wasn’t at all possible, and secondly, he couldn’t avoid the fact that if anyone had the answers he needed, it would be George. And these questions, these eternally tormenting questions, the absolute last thing they would do was answer themselves.

“No fucking w- Oh…” The harsh, unfriendly tone was a burden hardly lessened by the amusement that followed. “It’s  _ you _ .”

Matty knew in that moment that he ought to have wished for George, if only upon the basis that the alternative was certainly a much less bearable possibility.

“ _ Jesse _ .” Matty drew out a sigh; it took his all not to retreat immediately, to bury any lost hope of retrieving his heart, and what else was left of himself, deep inside his chest, to never be seen again.

“He’s not here.” Jesse didn’t need to clarify just as to who he was referring to, in much the same manner that Matty hadn’t needed to state who he was looking for.

“Oh…?” Matty bit his lip, not at all sure as to where he might go from here; he’d been so determined, at least down in his toes, and then, with the crashing realisation, with  the crippling truth of everything, Matty wasn’t quite sure what to make of himself anymore.

“You’ve set him off, you have.” Jesse couldn’t help but snort at the prospect; Matty was unsure whether it was more to do with George or more to do with him, yet, despite this confusion, he didn’t at all intend to ask.

“Right…” Matty trailed off: unsure as to what he was ought to say to that.

“Never actually seen him give that much of a shit about anyone at all…  _ ever _ …” Jesse shook his head, as if entirely bewildered by the mere concept. “What the fuck did you  _ say _ to him?”

“I didn’t say anything.” Matty hung his head low. “I think that was it.”

Jesse didn’t quite seem to get the gist of what Matty was saying, but it appeared that he had sufficient humanity in him as not to press the matter. “He’s told me he was going out to ‘ _ your place’ _ whatever that means- fucking hell, he’s absolutely, he’s fucking head over heels, he is-”

“ _ My place _ ?” Matty curled his expression up into one of confusion.

Jesse shook his head. “ _ Your _ place. You two’s. I think the word he used was ‘ _ ours’ _ .”

Matty’s eyes grew wide.

“Said that’d mean something to you if you came round with something else to say.” Jesse could see that it clearly didn’t, but still, he offered Matty a little half hearted wave and closed the door.

Matty stood there, this time just for minutes. Uncertain, lost up inside his own head, desperate to place just what could have possibly been  _ theirs _ .

It hurt him - the truth. That he didn’t know. That this was all he had to say for himself, to say for the way George had hurt, and the way he’d caused it.

As the skies darkened, Matty stood alone as minutes passed him by, and thought, or at least his subconscious did, as he allowed his mind to wander, and come to recall the boy George had told him about the previous night. The one that broke his heart.

Matty had promised, if only himself, that things wouldn’t be like that, not for them, that this wouldn’t end, not like this. Still, his head hurt, and still, things ceased to find sense, for he stared upon George, and caught the rise of fall of his chest, and the spark in his eyes, and the lines upon his lips, and still, he didn’t know what he ought to feel at all.

Yet however, this didn’t have to be the end.

George meant so much more than the way he smiled, or the taste upon his lips, or the all encompassing warmth that had wrapped around him in bed that weekend. Matty did miss that, he missed that George, but that was not all. Matty missed the George that had caught him, the George that laughed with him and not at him, the George that had made him see sense, the George that always followed his heart, whether or not the world deemed it as right, the George that had shoved a bag of weed into his hands one morning, the George that had changed his life.

Matty missed the George that made him feel alive.

For this boy, whatever lay inside that head of his, made Matty rise above the rest of the town, above grimey, derelict streets, above cursed smiles upon strange ashen faces, above the hatred and fear that ran through people, like a brother to the blood in their veins.

Matty reckoned, that first time they’d kissed, in that kitchen, with George’s cheeks - messy and tear-stained, they’d truly risen above everything else, with hearts on fire, burning with a never flickering flame, desperate to light up the darkness of the forever winter of the town.

He’d longed for summer, and George had given it to him. He’d longed for meaning, for comprehension to his heart and his feelings, and George had handed it over without qualms. He’d longed for someone, for something to mean more than the falsified shit he trawled through everyday. George had offered him it - no questions asked.

The truth, of course, was simple, not in words, but in emotion, for the forest, the bridge they’d fallen from, was entirely  _ theirs _ \- they’d made it so. And Matty’s heart - this was not a quest to get it back, for George had never stolen a thing from him. It was obvious now, he’d given it -  _ willingly _ .

-

It was the scent that hit him first. Weed.

With the familiar odor snaking through the trees, Matty found himself certain of George’s presence before he’d even laid eyes upon him. That ought to have left Matty to prepare himself for their encounter, to at least think of something to say before hurtling himself towards George. Of course, however, Matty did no such thing.

Minutes traipsed on for hours as George met Matty’s gaze through the trees. Sat atop the bridge, he didn’t say anything. Slowly approaching him, Matty offered just as little. They could have perhaps pretended that the silence was calming, or even that it was necessary, but they couldn’t have made themselves believe it.

George outstretched a hand to a shaking Matty, stood tentatively before the bridge; he still regarded it with distrust, however such feelings were not at all misplaced, for the events of the fall had never once left either boy’s mind.

Matty didn’t take it; he didn’t trust himself enough to, but he clung to George’s gaze instead as he staggered out across the bridge, collapsing into George upon a rather clumsy descent.

George couldn’t help but smile, watching as Matty kicked his legs out over the edge, seemingly with no concern for the danger that came with it. Matty smiled back, even if just for a moment.

The truth of the matter was that someone was going to have to speak eventually: sense was going to have to be made eventually. But Matty’s favourite thing about eventuality was that it never had to be now.

He cast moment after moment aside to the matter of simply watching the trees sway in the wind, or the way the trees cast shadows throughout the forest below, or the way the water beneath them began to flow as if forced along by a million, invisible oarsmen. Most of all, Matty spent his moments watching George - from his smile, to the tarnished boots upon his feet, he was beautiful.

Not beautiful like Charlotte. Not beautiful like girls at school. Not beautiful in the way that Adam or Ross might point out a girl and proclaim she was the most wonderful thing they’d ever seen.

George was beautiful the way a swamp was beautiful. In that, mostly he was rather off putting, and never particularly pleasant, and a constant annoyance, but he was the way a swamp was beautiful to an ecologist.

Matty felt these thoughts burn right through him, for he knew he dared not speak them aloud. They might have gotten him somewhere, but not in the way he would have liked, for still, he was terrified, of the glimmer in George’s eyes, and the heavy thudding of his heart.

The silence was broken not with choice, but with misfortune. For, as George passed the joint into Matty’s hand, it had slipped from his grasp and tumbled between them and down into the water below.

Both boys watched, eyes just as wide, as the river swept up the joint, instantly extinguishing it, and pulling it away with the current. Matty wondered what would have happened if George had somehow managed to drop his heart, or if George had for some reason decided to - if he’d managed to fuck this up enough to the extent of such a gesture.

“Fuck.” George muttered aloud, before he’d really had much chance to register what he’d done.

Matty curled his lips up into a smile: amused by the moment, or at least just glad to hear George’s voice again.

“Fuck, indeed.” Matty concurred. 

Matty’s voice seemed to have put George in a similar state: all brash, compensating laughter, and gaze flickering like a dancing flame. They were hopeless, truly, out there like that.

Two minutes drew out in passing, as a cold breeze snaked between them, before George managed to gather enough courage to face Matty directly. Beside him, Matty remained curled up inside himself: far more terrified than he ever cared to admit.

“So what is it?” His tone seemed to be falling apart to some degree, as if his inner resolve was tearing at the seams. Matty wished he could reach inside of his chest, to his heart, put it back in place, and fix him. Or at least, Matty wished for a world in which people worked like that.

“What do you mean?” His words made more of a stumble from his lips than a swan dive: tripping over their own metaphorical feet, as they descended through the air and down into the river below.

“This morning… that…” It hurt him - at least to speak it aloud. Matty could see that, clear as day, in the lines upon his face, and the dulling shine to his eyes. “That seemed a lot like a no. And I was okay with that-” George cut himself off.

Matty didn’t quite dare to look him in the eyes.

“ _ No _ . Fuck, no. I really wasn’t okay with that, but still, I knew it was your decision, so I was prepared to live with it.” George trailed off, chasing the treeline with his eyes. “But, then there’s  _ this _ , and this… this doesn’t seem so much like a no. What’s going on, Matty? Don’t leave me fucking guessing.”

Matty wished to bury a hole deep inside his chest, a grave to lay himself in, or at least to throw out his heart and lock something else up inside. He glanced down at the river below and thought about falling - in a way that he really daren’t speak aloud. Still, it seemed as if George had read it all from his lips.

“I’m sorry.” He muttered, as if it bade Matty any comfort. At least, he had to respect the fact that he was trying.

“I don’t know.” Matty spat out the truth, for it was simply all that was left to him. “Fucking hell, George, I don’t fucking  _ know _ , I-”

“Slow down.” George told him, reaching his fingertips out to brush against Matty’s arm; it had been intended as a comforting gesture but it only sent shivers down his spine.

“I like you George.” It pained him to say it, but it had to be done. “I like you but I don’t know how. I don’t understand it. Because I don’t like you like I liked Charlotte-”

“You  _ never _ liked Charlotte.” George interjected, chasing more than just the truth.

Matty didn’t find it within himself to disagree. 

“What I mean…” He trailed off, not at all sure of himself. “What I mean, is… I don’t think you’re… you know… pretty, in the way she’s pretty.”

George drew out a sigh. “Probably because she’s a girl, isn’t it?”

Matty gave a shrug. “I… I don’t mean I don’t  _ like- _ ”

“Matty…” George held his head in his hands, just for a brief moment. “As a bisexual, I can tell you that I’m not attracted to boys in the same way I’m attracted to girls, but that doesn’t mean my attraction’s less valid, it’s just… like… girls have nice tits, and boys are still nice even though they don’t have tits-”

“George, I think I…” Matty choked on his words. “I’m terrified, honestly.” He stared at the water below.

George followed his gaze.

“I think I’d rather drown than talk about it.” The words had left his lips before he’d given himself ample opportunity to consider them.

“I wouldn’t let you drown though, and I’d only make you talk about it more afterwards.” George offered, voice as stern as he could muster.

Matty only laughed.

“Charlotte broke up with me.” He drew out a sigh: unable to manage laughter that time. “I was right.” He offered, as if to lighten up the situation somehow.

“So you’re crawling back to me as a last resort?” George stared Matty down, his eyes burning with a tarnished, half-hearted type of malice.

“ _ No _ .” Matty insisted, staring George down, wondering if he even knew him at all. “I’m… I’m confused, fucking hell, George, I’m so fucking-”

“Are you going to find yourself another nice bullshit girlfriend so people won’t, god forbid, call you queer?” George snorted, as if to curse the part of himself that had ever put any amount of trust in this beautiful kind of ethereal bookshop boy.

Matty grew quiet. The silence rang louder than it ever had before.

“I think I am…” He trailed off. “ _ Queer _ .” His cheeks flushed red; it sounded wrong on his lips. “Or something like that- fucking hell, George, I don’t know if I like girls at all, I don’t know if I like boys, or if I just like you- I don’t know fucking  _ anything _ .”

George caught his breath in his throat. “Surely you know something.”

Matty, insistent, shook his head. “Fucking, I don’t-”

“Something.  _ Anything _ . Whatever comes to mind. Talk to me. Don’t focus on what you don’t know, but what you  _ do _ .”

Matty stared at George and dared to let something spring to mind.

“I know I want to kiss you.” Matty spoke without thinking.

“I know I do too.” George uttered, voice raw and broken, lips moving to Matty’s, amidst the cloudy skies, as the world around them painted itself a little less grey.

Pulling away, eyes dark, hesitant, George pushed soft words into Matty’s skin. “Is that not enough?”

Matty drew his doubts back inside himself. “Is it?”

“If you don’t go back to her, it is. I’m not being  _ the boyfriend _ , or some bullshit like that.” George swallowed hard.

Matty shivered. “I promise.”

And like that, as the skies opened up for rain, George kissed him again.

And they pretended, although they didn’t believe, that truly everything was as okay as they wanted it to be.

-


	7. "i love you."

Drowning was a rather odd concept. It’s not something anyone can properly grasp without experiencing it, and still anyone that lives to tell the tale has not really experienced it at all. Sure enough, water may have flooded their lungs, and they may have lain still under the most tempestuous of waves, but they never did truly  _ drown _ . For how it truly was to drown was long beyond anyone’s proper comprehension.

In more ways than one, falling in love was an awful lot like drowning. It was perhaps an abstract comparison to draw, however both love and drowning were already rather abstract concepts. Where did you draw the line between life and death? Where did you draw the line between lovers and friends? At what specific moment did everything make that change?

The sea always looked so inviting when you were stood upon the shore. With golden sand between bare toes, and the golden sun beating down upon you from above, the scene was more or less idyllic. Back of a postcard picturesque. 

With hands outstretched, tanning and burning all at once under the sun's rays, it was of course, only a matter of time. With everything, it was always a matter of time. Eventuality was a cruel mistress, and an undefeated champion. For the moment you stepped foot upon the shoreline, she bade you to tread into the ocean.

When it came to the matters of love, that was the first glance. That was the tug of your heart. And every broken promise to yourself - that it wouldn’t be like that this time. Though the heart never listened, for it communicated not in words, not in thoughts, but in unexplainable convulsions, beats akin to the rolling of tide.

Perhaps it was just a little chilly once you got your feet wet. Perhaps you yearned to retreat back onto the shore. But you got used to it. You always did. And under the sun’s beating rays, the pull of the waves seemed so enticing.

It was always more than tide lapping over your ankles, always more than a few hesitant smiles. For before you could entirely process what was happening, control of your body was long gone, and you had set out on an unstoppable journey through the waves.

First kiss. Knee deep.

A regular thing. Waist deep.

Sex. Chest deep.

Love. Uncertain. Neck deep.

By the time you could say ‘I love you’ and truly mean it, the water was up to your eyes. And there was no turning back after that. In your lover’s response came the defining moment - came the acception or the rejection: came learning to breathe underwater or drowning. For the water would not stop, the waves of the ocean would not still, not for a single weeping soul.

Falling in love was a lot like drowning. Or at least, the last few minutes beforehand. By the point you knew there was no real solution, by the point you were certain nature and fate had concurred upon the cruel hand you’d been drawn. At that point, you just had to hold your breath and pray.

And in the morning, perhaps you wake up, disoriented upon the shore, sand between your fingers and toes, or perhaps you simply wouldn’t at all. Perhaps that was where you’d lie - the bottom of the ocean forever.

Matty had never learned how to swim. It wasn’t a skill that he would need to call upon in a tiny, land-locked town in the north of England. Still, it was perhaps rather notable considering the circumstances.

For he’d followed this boy into the middle of the ocean without a shred of knowledge as to how he might reach the shore again. All Matty bore in his heart was the dreadful kind of all consuming hope. It dared not to label itself false, although it hardly hurried to conceal its identity.

Despite all of his better sense, despite every heartbroken romance he’d read, despite every sad story he’d ever heard, despite every lesson his mother had ever told him, despite every word of warning his friends had ever uttered, Matty followed George into the ocean. Hand in his.

Yet, again, falling in love was so much like drowning in the fact that you could never quite plan for it. You never did exactly know just when it was happening until, there it was, and where was the air that was once in your lungs, where was the sense that was once in your head?

Matty held George’s hand. Tightly. Clueless.

He told himself that George at least must have known what he was doing. If only on the grounds of him being two years older. He didn’t.

George’s eyes traced Matty’s smile. Hopeful. Clueless.

The TV was on in the background. Meaningless white noise. Serving to extinguish the sounds of silence from an empty house. The others had gone; they didn’t talk about it. They didn’t talk about them.

Falling in love was an odd sensation, through and through. It was infinitely more powerful, and infinitely more powerless than you could ever figure. Love took your whole world - took everything you’d ever once known, everything you’d ever once called your own, and reframed it, rebuilt it in its own image.

For in the whole world that night, there sat only two. George Daniel, eighteen, tired eyes, and messy hair, watching the television. And Matty Healy, sixteen, ashen, sickly skin, and caffeine jolted vision, watching the boy beside him.

George hadn’t noticed. Matty’s stare. Or Matty’s eyes - twitching, slightly. Or Matty’s skin, growing paler by the minute. Or Matty’s shivers. Or Matty’s lips - stretched out slack and faded. George hadn’t noticed everyone else leave. George hadn’t noticed himself, and the hole he’d carved for himself.

It wasn’t that George was unobservant, although he was. It was that George was sober.

Sense called upon a world in which sobriety had much of the opposite effect. Although sense called upon a world in which George had never lived in. He didn’t grieve that lack of clarity in his surroundings, in his state of mind, he just grieved the smile of boy who’d left that world behind.

George hadn’t meant drag Matty out into the ocean. He just did.

Spontaneity was a recurring demon throughout George’s years. For he’d never at all  _ meant _ to live home at sixteen. He just did. He’d never at all meant to become so dependent of drugs. He just did.

George felt an awful lot like his every decision was predetermined by some sort of higher power. That his life was framed in the manner of some sort of cruel joke: a prolonged experiment, perhaps to entertain some sadistic, extra-terrestrial king out there, somewhere.

Despite that, despite himself, George didn’t believe in God. Much like George didn’t believe in love. Much like George didn’t believe in falling. Much like George didn’t believe in too much, or too little. Or boys that deserved more than ashtray armchairs, and cobwebbed ceilings, and the kind of love that took but never gave.

George knew only one thing more than Matty. And that was that this wasn’t good for either of them. He knew, in essence that it would destroy one, or the both of them. But George had always been so inherently self-destructive, and bade farewell to the illusion that he’d ever once been a good person, and let Matty crumble to pieces in his lap.

“I’m tired.” Matty’s voice grew softer with every day. With every hazy afternoon. It served as tantalising proof that George, was in fact, ruining him.

“Mmm?” George cocked an eyebrow up to the sky. To the non-existent clock on the wall - for no, that had been a different home, that had been a different world, a different ocean, with a different boy.

Henry’s house had bore polished ornaments and pristine wallpaper in elegant pastel shades, and carefully attended-to potted plants, and a great ornate clock in the wall - face donned with roman numerals, and an elegantly sculpted golden frame. That had been the one.

“Can we go to bed?” He continued on in the same lethargic drivel, although George sought to suspect that it was some sort of a front. Perhaps upon the sole basis that he had chosen the word ‘bed’ and not the word ‘sleep’. And perhaps also the word ‘we’ and not the word ‘I’.

George had figured, over time, that to know Matty, you had to know his words. George spoke more in gestures, in smiles, in journeys, in possessions, in the way his eyes might have moved across the room.

Matty offered up very little when he spoke. Even with George. Especially with George. He folded in upon himself, tugged everything in, and spoke only in words. Very carefully chosen and formatted words. He’d taken care, he’d taken precision in presenting himself through the least amount of syllables necessary. It was an art, so to speak, and one he loved to observe.

But when George wasn’t observing Matty, he was tearing him apart.

And Matty was all hands and looks, and smiles and smirks, and noises in his throat, and beads of sweat on his forehead, the moment George laid him down upon his back.

It was an odd thought, but that didn’t cause George to abstain from thinking it. He wondered, more often than not, if each and every day he was slowly, but surely, fucking the life out of Matthew Healy: tearing away, whatever part of him made work so perfectly. What made him the beautiful perfect boy George had striven to known.

These were not vindictive endeavours, instead somewhere halfway sober, come four in the morning, George had lost his mind, in the golden ring in Matty’s eyes. It flickered like a faulty light. Like every creaking floorboard in that house.

Jesse was gone. George wondered, sometimes, if he’d even ever existed.

He forgot what sober meant anymore. And if he ever truly was.

Matty laid on his back. And up he stared.  _ Expectantly _ .

George wondered, in the briefest moment of clarity, just what he’d done. The moment passed, as he felt his soul scorned by the agonising stare of what lay above, cutting in through the window. He closed the curtains. And still Matty stared.

Words had abandoned him. They’d left him here.

It had been George’s fault. He was sure of that, at least. He threw himself down on the bed and kissed Matty again.

He stared back into the hallway; Jesse wasn’t here anymore. Some part, deep inside of his heart, torn back away in whatever was left of his soul, wondered if this was even the same house anymore.

When did your home, become someone else’s? When was that moment? When was the change? When did Matty stop being his own and become George’s? When did George stop thinking in ways he could understand?

He kissed Matty stupid, for fear that he might read his mind; terrified, somehow, that he had the answers. He didn’t doubt that of him. Matty’s eyes burned bright, but still they felt dead, for George was dying here - slowly. It was a terrible mess, and fate sat back and laughed, for the first time, it was none of her doing at all.

This one, every wretched evening. It was all on George. On the patterns racing like vipers around his head. Matty’s skin was too pale now. He noticed only as he tore holes in it. As he turned it purple between his lips.

But you could water a dead rose as many times you liked, and still the buds would never blossom.

“I love you.” Matty whispered up into his neck, tracing his spine with his fingertips. George shivered into his touch, like the last shake an animal gave before it died.

He couldn’t chase his own head anymore. This was him. This was him. Empty house. Never quite sober. Head chasing himself out of it. He’d left. He’d chased himself out.

And a month ago, George and Matty had sat together out on the bridge and kissed and swore they knew how love worked. And that was how it had all begun.

-

Twenty eight days.

Grey skies. Washed white. Not quite pure white but forever grey. An ache. Something beyond words.

George loved the streets. Bright lights, to dimly lit winding back lanes. He craved the freedom of the fresh air. George wondered if the reason why he’d run from so many homes was his fear of being closed in. No walls, no matter how familiar, could ever quite be his friends.

Forever, George wondered if ‘friends’ really did mean a thing. And whether ‘lovers’ held any more glory, for still, despite his constant push to suppress it, every night George caught the stars in the night sky and felt a thought: stolen from his head, a thought for Cam.

Cam had been both timid and wild at entirely the same time. He’d been too much and all too little in the very same moment. And George just  _ wished _ for something that had mattered. He’d spent hours, he’d spent days convincing himself that every boy, every girl was always the one.

Why he bothered was beyond him. He figured, perhaps, that he just needed to feel loved.

But Matty hadn’t been like that. With Matty, George had spent every day convincing himself that he  _ didn’t _ love him. It had made a change, at least.

Although, the change seemed to be quite a bit more than temporary. It clung to him like unsavoury spite, or loaded words, or eternally strung out chains of curses. Jesse had noticed it too.

Jesse didn’t notice much. But this, had certainly not escaped him.

He failed, however, to find the exact  _ courage _ to directly address the matter for a rather lengthy amount of time. If Jesse had really had any sort of proper moral compass, he would have perhaps declared that it had failed him on that account. But George and Jesse lived in a shitty little house in a shitty little town, with a life’s aim to get high enough to find fascination in the cracks on the ceiling.

Jesse missed that part of George. His George. Or perhaps just the mark he’d made upon him. The bit he’d tied down to the house, to his head. To the sorry little world they lived in. Jesse sought to fix things. If they ever did need fixing.

For the cracks remained unfilled, and he just stared, at this boy, who might have been his best friend, if he’d ever believed in best friends. But Jesse had never bothered with that shit as a kid. Instead he’d overturned wasps’ nests and waded deep into rivers. As if on some kind of juvenile death wish.

Still, he’d been a great deal more alive as a kid, it seemed. But hadn’t they all?

“I miss you.” Jesse’s words were always cloaked in the truth, but forever failed to quite  _ contain _ it. “You’re never out with me anymore. Where are  _ our _ drugs? Where are  _ our _ parties?” He laughed that great bark of a Jesse Rutherford laugh; the one that always reminded George of a hunting dog let off its lead. Although it forever lead him to wonder, just who was the fox, and who was the huntsman.

“I’m out with you now.” George muttered, words sliding bitterly between his teeth. It wasn’t even a lie; they were. The streets were grey and cold, mirroring what lay inside - it was not at a social outing - George had somewhat stopped being social at all, but Jesse regarded it with gratitude nonetheless.

“Because you have to be.” Jesse offered up what they both already know. “Because it’s  _ your _ turn.” Jesse gave a nudge to the lump in George’s jacket pocket. He smiled; George did not.

“I know.” George knew. George knew a thousand times over, like a thousand reasons why he should get out of this house, and out of this town, and never look Jesse in the eye ever again.

He always quite struggled with defining the nature of his and Jesse’s relationship. At first, it had been enemies sober, and best friends high. Which, admittedly had been a rather intriguing outcome, but not something George had felt particularly obliged to meddle with. Yet the ricocheting mess they’d landed in over the months tended to rear a much more hideous head.

“We’re  _ late _ .” Jesse reminded him; all too clinical, formal, and sincere. George forgot, sometimes, that Jesse Rutherford did, at times, think of himself as a proper businessman.

George gave the cocaine a nudge in his pocket and rolled his eyes.

“He can wait.” He supplied, although it was far beyond his place to do so.

Jesse looked as if he ought to have slapped him for such a comment. But he did not. He inhaled, slowly, as if it pained him, and sucked his tongue against his cheek.

“And Matty can’t.”

George had known the comment was coming; still, it didn’t lessen the blow.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” George balled his hands into fists and tried to even out his breathing.

Jesse gave a shrug: apathetic, entirely untruthful. “I don’t know, George. What do you think?”

George thought about punching him. But he, at least, was yet to get quite that stupid.

It was then that the street rounded off into a corner and Jesse straightened himself up: pushing out his shoulders, so very desperate to look that extra little bit intimidating. George wondered, sometimes, if it had been his height that had led Jesse to consider taking him under his wing.

He thought that should have bothered him, but it changed nothing at all. They were still two rotten people, stood on a rotten street corner, searching for what was wrong.

Because there was. Something wrong. That was  _ exceedingly _ evident.

Jesse twitched a little. George stood so very still.

It was then, that shadows cast all wrong, grew so very tall as they mingled with the light, and from the hedgerow of a seemingly menial house, stepped a man - short hair, broad shoulders, tall, taller than Jesse, but not quite as tall as George.

Jesse didn’t say a word. The man already knew.

As he finally stepped out into full view of the sunlight, George couldn’t deny it any longer. For the man before him stood clad in blue. A clinical, sickly blue, like plastered walls, and reception desks, and forever tensing waiting rooms, and-

Before George could quite draw a further conclusion, Jesse was gone.

It took him a while to properly process the mere possibility, but as he glanced back and forth, it was evident that the space beside him was very empty, and there was a distant silhouette darting down the road.

George should have run too. But he didn’t.

George stared the man in the eyes. It wasn’t a gesture of bravery, it was one of sedance. The man quirked his lips up into a smile and took a step closer.

“Alright then. Do we see how this is going to go?”

George nodded.

It was well within the realms of reality for him to run. He was confident, maybe even over-confident, but confident nonetheless, that he could outrun him, or that he could at least hide. That he could somehow, by any means, get himself out of the situation.

The funny thing was, that he just couldn’t. Couldn’t bring himself to.

As if it wasn’t quite worth the effort.

Like the water was growing deeper, pulling him down, and he’d rather just let it than battle the waves on the swim to shore.

He understood then. About the boy he’d left behind.

For that moment, that boy was him.

George wondered if this was it. The last time he couldn’t run away. Despite every sense he might have had about him; the idea excited him, furiously. Burning like a flame against his skin.

-

“It’s not mine.”

George pleaded. Albeit, honestly.

Such desperation, however, hardly fared well upon anyone. But, of course, they knew that. And still, they looked down upon him like they knew him too.

George sat back in his chair and turned his tongue over in his mouth. They watched him still.

“It’s not mine.” He repeated, on the off chance that they hadn’t heard him; he knew, of course, that wasn’t the case. They were waiting, waiting for something more, waiting for the version of events that they’d much rather call the truth.

George reckoned they might be waiting a while.

“Who’s then?” The younger dared to inquire, as minutes wasted ticked past thirty five. George could be exceedingly patient, he’d discovered.

George dug his teeth down into his bottom lip. “A…  _ friend’s _ …” He knew the words didn’t quite fit his lips.

The older arched an eyebrow.

“He’s not my friend.” George corrected himself. “But it’s his coke. And it’s not all of it.”

The younger dared to try on a smile. “Very kind of you - to pin the blame on him.”

George shrugged his conscience from his shoulders. “Very kind of him - to run away.”

The older gave a nod, as if seriously considering all George had to say for himself.

“What’s this guy’s name?” He knew he was pushing it; he knew the look in George’s eyes, he’d seen it all, a million times before.

“And why should I tell you that?” George stretched out back in his chair, desperate to distance himself from the police officers as much as was physically possible. It was, however, hardly a significant amount in a room the size of a half-bathroom.

“Because, kid.” He continued, nonchalant, entirely disinterested. “Possession. This is where you make the  _ decision _ , isn’t it? One of you takes the fall. Either him or you. I suppose if he was your friend, you ought to have been decent about it, but you don’t seem awfully sure of that anymore.”

George shook his head. “He’s not my friend.”

“Well, is it his cocaine?” The younger continued, sadistic grin splitting across his lips. George watched to punch him too, amidst the entire contents of the rest of the world.

George gave a nod, daring to lean forward. He’d fucked this up already; he knew. But there was always another place, another ‘home’, another four walls. If George was determined of anything, this wasn’t what ended  _ him. _

It had perhaps destroyed the at all decent part of him; the part of him worth keeping alive, but George had long grown unattached to that part of himself. Perhaps that was the sign to let go. Perhaps there was no sign at all.

He reckoned maybe he’d been the huntsman from the start. And he’d been the depths of the deep blue sea. And there was everything worth keeping alive rocking upon the waves out in a little raft somewhere. But he’d laid it to rest a long time ago.

“I can give you his full name.” George didn’t hear his own voice. His head was radio static. A world in which it mattered. He thought about the world he’d leave behind; the beautiful boy, the sense of everything - false, but forever comforting.

“Good.” They, of course, encouraged him. George knew it was only their job, yet still, he couldn’t help but let it under his skin.

“And his address. There’s more in there. He keeps shit in the kitchen drawers. Right at the back. He thinks it’s… the most fucking  _ secure _ thing in the world, but nothing’s… nothing’s really ever safe the moment somebody else knows about it…”

“And if there’s nothing there-”

“There  _ is _ .” George cut him off: eyes blazen, determined. He wasn’t sure where he was going to go, what he was going to do, but he knew in that moment, that he was not going to let himself drown.

“You’ll see it.” He continued, folding his arms across his chest; eyes up to the sky as he bade goodbye to his conscience.

This was it - his  _ real _ last chance. He decided it this time for sure. And it wasn’t going to end - it wasn’t going to end like this.

-

Dilapidated was the word. It brought George sick to his stomach. Although, it certainly wasn’t alone in that.

Twenty four days ago, George had lost a part of himself.

He’d never quite liked it, he’d never quite trusted it, but it had been his home for some time - this house. The cracks in the walls weren’t quite the same when he knew who had put them there. For this wasn’t a place of reason, of malice, of intent, of law, of judgement, of cruelty, of mercy, of truth, of lies. It was a place of being, and that was it.

George’s fingertips scraped dust from the walls. It wasn’t a home anymore.

And he wished he’d never left. He wished the cold had drawn in and killed him in the end. Or he wished, at least, for a better world, one in which he’d had it within himself to take the place. A world in which they were, legally, his drugs. And not Jesse’s.

The house was empty.

Empty in a way that ‘empty’ couldn’t quite convey. It lacked spirit, it lacked soul, as if every happy memory had been forcibly ripped from the very fibres of the walls. It was empty in a way that made him well and truly sick.

Jesse wasn’t coming back. None of them were.

Feet dragged him in through the trashed hallway, into the kitchen, in much more of a state of disarray. This was George’s doing. He knew it - not just in his mind, but in his heart. And then, not just in his heart, but in his bones. 

Every kitchen drawer lay open. Empty. Dragged off their hinges. There was a stain on the windowsill. George didn’t want to know what it was.

He took in a deep breath, and he tried. Truly. He tried not to notice the footprints, the muddy skid marks, lain across the floor. Truly. He tried not think of his friends, of his once friends, dragged out of here. Truly. He built himself a world in which things were right.

Jesse was more than Cam. This was different. This was definite. George felt it in the absolute pits of his heart and sought to destroy it.

He knew Jesse would have taken the blame for him. Because despite his nature, despite his every abominable quality, Jesse would never throw him into the mess. It had never been about that.

George had never been quite sure as to why Jesse had taken him, into his little ‘family’ - if such a word could ever fit the place. He figured now, at least, he’d never find out. There was perhaps some eternal rule about never betraying your family, but it was not a rule George could believe in.

He traced the word ‘family’ in the dust. He scoffed. There wasn’t enough left for him to believe in at all. In the end, he rubbed it all away.

-

Twenty days before. George had figured out what loneliness felt like, down to the smell, down to the stench.

He sat in the attic Jesse had never let him into.

Jesse still wasn’t back. George knew he wasn’t coming back - whichever way things went down, but still, he sat there waiting. George knew even if he did return, it would not be pleasant between the two of them, but still, he hoped.

George hoped and drew heavy night air into his lungs.

The attic was perhaps the only part of the house that had been left intact - Jesse had kept it that way. George had lifted the lock in four days. He’d guessed it was where Jesse kept all that mattered, all his god forbidden secrets.

In reality, all the attic held was dust, a flickering light bulb, a sofa bed, a drawer full of drugs, and a letter, half-finished, never sent home. George had never really thought about Jesse even having the capacity to write, which admittedly, sounded rather ridiculous when he thought about it, but still, the letter in its entirety, couldn’t help but intrigue him. He decided then, however, to finally think about the decent thing, and put it down where he’d left it.

The same didn’t go for the drugs though. George had missed cocaine. He came into contact with it everyday, but allowing himself to snort it was another thing entirely. George didn’t miss many things - not really.

He stared at it, sealed away in a plastic bag, for far too long. His eyes rolled back into his skull, and not once did he leave the attic.

But days dragged on, and the world closed in around him, and George did lines until he could build himself a heart. For whatever lay in his chest was long decayed and abandoned.

-

George’s eyes were rolled back into his skull when Matty walked in. Through the backdoor, for George had barricaded the front. He didn’t ask why, he didn’t even stare; he simply stood, meek and mild a metre away. Eighteen days prior.

Matty looked as if he wanted to ask whether George was okay; of course the answer was exceedingly obvious - he instead seemed a lot like he just wanted to fill the air, to fill his head, to make sense of the moment, dragged out forever.

George didn't look him in the eye; Matty wasn’t sure if he could. He didn’t know what to think anymore; fear was unmissable in his eyes. George turned his heart over in his chest and choked on it.

“I got punched today. At school.” Matty proclaimed with the kind of nonchalance that dug down deep with intent: set out to get under George’s skin. Sure enough, it succeeded.

George found enough will within himself to set his gaze upon the doorway, to set his world upon the boy in it. His body ached and groaned with the movement. George felt like he’d been sat on the sofa for years.

He eyed the coffee table. And the bag sat sheepishly upon it. Matty followed his gaze, and it all happened before George could stop him.

“Is that  _ cocaine _ ?” Matty’s eyes widened in horror: looking as if he’d never seen it before in his life. George remembered then, he likely hadn’t. It hit him still, through it all, that Matty was sixteen.

“Is that a  _ black eye _ ?” George replied, in much the same tone, wishing for a world in which he never had to answer Matty’s question.

The boy before him flushed: squirming out of his skin. He trailed delicate fingertips up his cheek to brush against it. George watched, not really processing a thing, as Matty cut across the room and took a seat beside him. He reached out for the cocaine; George stopped him.

“Don’t touch that.” He warned him, as if he had any right to teach Matty right from wrong.

Matty simply scoffed, taking only amusement from the situation. He eyed the cocaine carefully, as if attempting to judge how much George had snorted, of course, such an attempt was fruitless. Matty sighed, all heavy and breathless, like he didn’t want to talk at all.

“Charlotte has this new boyfriend, you see-”

“It’s barely been a week? What a fucking  _ slag _ , I-” George felt it was best to respond with anger, to overcompensate if anything - a feeble last ditch attempt to drag Matty’s attention away from the empty house and the emptying bag.

“So do  _ I _ .” Matty reminded him; his grin seemed entirely out of place in the house. Still, he stared George down with the kind of love that made it all feel wrong. George was aware, barely, but  _ aware _ , as to just how much of a mess he’d managed to make of all of this.

“So do you.” George quirked his lips up into a smile and kissed Matty regardless. Because if George could tie his name down to anything, it was certainly bad decisions; he decided to own that, to lay his claim to it, as he calmly, gently, took Matty onto his lap.

“He gave me the black eye.” Matty explained, drawing his words out like endless balls of thread. 

George clenched his fists. “I’ll fucking give him one back, I’ll-”

“You’re not getting yourself in anymore trouble.” Matty told him rather firmly. “It’s fine. It was a one time thing. He didn't bother with the whole ‘faggot’ thing, at least. Funny, seeing this time it's true, isn’t it?”

Matty grinned down at George; he didn’t grin back.

“I don’t like it…” He trailed off, pressing his thumbs into Matty’s sides, between his ribs. Matty tried to remember how to breathe.

“Yeah, well George, I don’t fucking like what you did to Jesse, but that fucking-”

“You  _ know _ ?” George didn’t let him finish, his eyes seemed to burn. And Matty knew better than to play with fire.

“Gemma came to say goodbye to me. She’s going into the city, you see? Away from all this. Away from you, was maybe one of the phrases she used. She suggested that I should too, and it was, it was kind of like all that Adam and Ross had said to me, coming to life. And I sat for a while and stared at my bedroom wall and  _ thought _ , I thought about what I was going to do with you. Where I was going to go. Because I still have feelings for you. Of course I do.”

“Come to do away with me as well?” George gave a laugh, pushing Matty out of his lap.

Matty glared back down at him. “Stop fucking- you’re  _ high _ -”

“I’m always high.” George told him, far too truthfully.

“Weed’s different to fucking  _ cocaine _ , though, isn’t it?” He drew out a sigh, and pushed whatever remained in the bag onto the floor. George just watched him. 

In George’s head, he had screamed, he would have thrown a fit, he would have kissed this boy in a house that felt right. But that was all so beyond him

“I want to…” Matty trailed off, eyes to the floor, for he feared looking at the devil anymore.

“I want to…” George mirrored him, softly, attempting to draw scenes from the deepest corners of his head. “Too. Whatever it is.”

“I want to stay. I want to love you. I want this to work. I really think I do.” Matty held George’s gaze, just for a moment. “I think… maybe what everyone else says just doesn’t matter at all. If people don’t matter to me, then why should their words?”

George gave a nod of agreement, before he’d even had time to consider a word that had left Matty’s lips. He told himself that it was what being in love meant.

“I want to, too.” George regarded him with a smile, one crafted perfectly, artificially strewn, from the part of George’s mind that could bare silence no more. Matty was pretty, but prettier when he smiled.

George traced his finger over his back. He wanted to stare. He wanted to take him in with his eyes and his eyes alone. He yearned for a world in which things might work out that way. A world in which Matty held out his hand and asked George to take it.

A world in which George wasn’t thinking about getting the coke out of the carpet. A world in which George missed them; a world in which he let himself.

He stared at the floor and considered a world. Considered a whole wide universe, one in which he might be able to fix things, and might wake up to a day where everything would feel right. But his head throbbed in his skull, and his heart sought to escape his chest.

But still, he wanted Matty in more than ways words could express. Perhaps it was simple, perhaps it was all he had left, or perhaps George had more to say for himself than that.

Matty kissed him, on the lips, tongue in his mouth. And George didn’t get to find out.

-

Matty reckoned having sex with eighteen year old, halfway drug dealer, George Daniel, was perhaps the  _ last _ thing his parents would ever want him to do. That was perhaps, precisely why he did it.

Sex was a  _ thing _ . A  _ Thing _ . With a capital ‘T’. 

Matty reminded himself that he was sixteen, and depending upon which way you looked at it, he was perhaps  _ supposed _ to do these things. Still, it felt wrong. Wrong in more than the way of simple adolescent rebellion. Wrong in a deeper sense, wrong, heavy in his heart.

He thought he should have expressed those feelings. Maybe just once, to leave them breathe, to let those words see the light of day. But it was rather a lot to comprehend with George inside of him.  _ Inside _ . The word had Matty’s head spinning, although he didn’t think it was just that.

He was perhaps only  _ vaguely _ aware of the tracing pattern of George’s fingertips across his spine. He wondered if his head was screwed on wrong - if that was it. If there were even simple answers anymore.

“This is…”

Matty didn’t speak until the cold wind threw in from the open window. He didn’t speak until he started to feel again. He’d lost his head, he’d lost feeling in his toes. He sat still, he sat silence as George cleaned up their mess. He’d never seen George clean before; it was rather odd.

It was all rather odd. Although, Matty couldn’t help but suspect that odd didn’t quite cover it.

“This is…” He tried again. George’s eyes didn’t meet his own; he wondered if that was what he was waiting for. Or if it was for the world to make things easy again. He wondered if he’d be waiting a long time.

“It is.” George finished for him in the end. Smug smile, silence smug evermore. They spoke like that. In broken conversations, in half formed words, in gestures, in darting gazes, in a world shimmering in shades of white and gold, yet never in a way anyone else could see.

Matty thought sometimes, George looked around through the house cautiously, as if he expected someone else to be there.

He could never quite imagine  _ exactly _ what it was that had occurred between George and Jesse, and although he certainly couldn’t deny it bothered him, with those long looks and breathless sighs, he very much knew that it wasn’t his place to pry.

“It is what?” Matty pushed one leg out, away from his chest, as if daring to brace the world, or perhaps just the chill sent in from the open window. He thought, maybe, he should put on some more clothes.

George fell back onto the bed, tossing Matty a lazy kind of smile; a side of George he’d almost come to miss. Things didn’t seem easy anymore. Like sandcastles on the shore. It was perhaps only a matter of time until the tide brought them down entirely.

“I don’t know - you tell me.” He propped his head up with his hands, gazing at Matty, as if lost somewhere between adoration and amusement. Matty reminded himself sometimes; he really didn’t know George at all.

Matty drew in a great gasp of cold air. He wondered why it was still so cold for summer. For what a bullshit summer it seemed to be. He yearned for something that felt warm, that felt real. He glanced over to George: desperately uncertain as to whether he quite managed to fill that hole.

“It feels wrong.” He told George: outright, for perhaps all they had left to their name was honesty. “When we  _ fuck _ .” He spat the word through his lips like it was a disease he wanted to rid himself of.

George quirked an eyebrow: more unsettled than he cared to admit. “Wrong?” There came that same confident smile, but that time around, it took a form that neither boy could believe in.

“Yeah.” Matty gave a nod, biting at his lip. “ _ Wrong _ .” He repeated, forcing the word through his lips.

“You don’t like it?” George laughed, as if it was somehow funny. It was not.

Matty shook his head.

George sat bolt upright.

“ _ No _ .” Matty brought his hands up to his face. “I do. I do like it. I do like you. That’s what I meant, you… it just… it feels like something we  _ shouldn’t _ be doing.”

George scoffed, far more relieved than he’d ever care to admit. “Isn’t that the fun of it?” He regarded Matty with that same devilish glint to his eye; it swore to Matty to run, to get himself as far away as quickly as possible.

Matty gave a shrug as he moved closer, pressing his head against George’s shoulder.

“I mean… says  _ who _ ?” He added. “Who says it’s ‘wrong’?” He drew out a sigh; Matty could see the subject hurt him more than he could ever care to admit.

“The whole world…” Matty closed his eyes. “It seems…”

George gave a laugh. “Well fuck the whole world. And fuck everyone in it.”

Matty smiled. “I thought the idea was that we only fuck each other?”

George snorted, hand finding its way into Matty’s curls.

-

Love tasted bitter on Matty’s tongue. Like poison. Like liquid spite. He yearned for a world in which he would not have to think with his heart, and instead make sense with his head.

George sat on the kitchen countertop. Matty stirred a mug of tea with unnecessary vigour. They lived like that, in fake peace, ten days before.

“I’m thinking…” George drew out his words like shards of glass, like promises made to be broken.

Matty stared him down: long and hard, forever yearning to figure him out.

“I should go  _ home _ .” He spat the word ‘home’ as if he feared that it might hurt him.

Matty dropped his teabag into his mug with much the same power; hot tea splashed back onto his hands; he didn’t say a word.

George watched him: all wide eyes and eternal stares. Matty sought to cut him down. To make sense, to make a world, to make a lover, out of this stupid, fucking beautiful boy.

Matty wanted more than fingertips, than trails of possibilities on his back. He wanted to reach for his hand. Perhaps in the street as they walked. He yearned for a world, for a head in which he could survive that.

George knew him, in looks, in silent conversations, and that dull morning, he stared him down and read his mind. Matty let him, chasing his thoughts out his head.

He reached for Matty’s head. The kitchen fell still; the dust settled for them, the kettle stopped whistling, the wind ceased to tear in through the open window.

“I think I should stop fucking around.” George drew out the words like they hurt him; Matty knew that they did.

He gave a brash, unruly kind of laugh, one that seemed as if it had been ripped straight from George’s lips.

“Yeah, I think you fucking  _ should _ . Stop fucking people around - stop fucking  _ me _ around- fucking  _ hell _ , George. I thought you said, this was- this was  _ us _ , and you-”

George shook his head. “You’ve got it fucking wrong, Matty. I’m ruining your life. I’m ruining mine. Fucking sitting around all day, fucking I fucked things up again. I  _ fucked _ up. So this is what I do, I  _ leave _ . And I’m… going home. Because if I fucked up Jesse’s life, I at least ought to fix mine. I owe him that - it was always what he was trying to do… I think.”

“George…” Matty didn’t know what to think. To make of them. To make of George anymore.

“Fuck it - I mean, you’re always going to need more than me, more than this, more than this  _ shit.  _ I was just fucking kidding myself, you were  _ always _ going to get another girlfriend, and things were always going to work out just fine for you, and I’d always be…” He drew out a sigh. “Here.”

Matty didn’t know what to say. At all.

“Or not here. Not anymore.” He corrected himself, chasing rampant thoughts around his head.

“I’m not.” He spat his words across the room like poison. “Going to get another  _ girlfriend _ .” He told George plainly, he told George for fact.

George raised an eyebrow: disbelieving.

“I think…” Matty took a step away from the kitchen counter, making complicated work of pacing around the kitchen. George watched him, in love, in regret, forever unable to figure his own head out.

“I think I’m gay.” He told him, struggling to work the word out of his lips.

George watched him, as if Matty might break before him. Matty wondered if George wanted him to; he wondered if that was what he was looking for - an excuse to stay. Matty wondered if he’d be that for him. If he’d tear himself down to that.

“Yeah.” George gave a nod: like it was nothing, and granted, in George’s head, it likely was. “I mean, you sucked my dick this morning, it doesn’t really have the same sort of impact like that.”

Matty rolled his eyes, trying to smile, trying to laugh, trying to look George in the eyes and see the boy he’d once seen.

“Yeah, but you  _ didn’t _ . You didn’t know. You didn’t fucking walk into that bookshop and see me, and know I was gay, and that I’d suck your dick, and you didn’t  _ fucking _ know you’d  _ leave _ me.” Matty bit his lip: here it was - trying not to cry.

“Yeah…” George shook his head. “I don’t know what you want me to say.”

“I want you to fucking  _ stay _ , that’s it, I fucking-”

George let him cry, let him pace back and forth, let him sort his head out, the very best he could.

“I need to go home.” He repeated the words aloud, as if he just might get himself to finally believe it.

Matty shook his head.

“I read…” George trailed off, his head drawn back to the first day, and the way they’d been. “I read that book, you know.” He told him, choosing his words too carefully.

Matty looked at him cautiously, as if he didn’t quite allow himself to.

“Christine…” He dragged the word out between his lips: prolonging the moment. “The one I bought, for the weed… you know? I sat out that afternoon and read the thing, and Chelsea looked at me like I was a fucking lunatic, and I didn’t blame her, but I… I think… she knew I loved you then.”

Matty shook his head, dodging the bullet behind his every word. “Well, it doesn’t fucking  _ matter _ , because you left her and you’re leaving me. There’s no fucking  _ Chelsea _ anymore, there’s no fucking  _ us _ anymore, is there?”

“ _ There is _ .” George uttered, like he was pleading. Like he wanted to retreat back inside of himself; Matty wondered what he had made of him.

He shook his head. “You were quite clear.” It was effortless under appearance, but it was clearly not quite the case. 

George looked as if he wanted to say something more, yet with the whole world poised upon his lips, Matty cut him wordless, entirely.

“Not anymore.” He reminded him.

And George watched that time, as he let him go. As this beautiful boy stormed past him, and out of the backdoor. George listened for the slam, but it never came. All that remained was trails of footsteps and the cold summer breeze.

There, alone in that kitchen, George came to wonder if the world was truly ending. For it didn’t half feel like it.

He stared back at the empty drawers, at the open door, and wondered what feeling was anymore.

-

“I love you.”

Three days before. Empty words uttered from empty mouths.

Two empty boys sat side by side. And stared through the darkness, desperate to see something

One lonely heart beat between their chests. Between the blurred lines, between the broken promises, it was impossible to tell who it had first belonged to.

The silence rang true and George lit himself a cigarette.

Matty watched the sun like it had ever meant a thing. Warmth was an illusion. Summer was a facade. Happiness was a vail, a false hope to shroud himself within.

He wanted out; he thought, some days, with some things. 

George’s throat grew dry. He told himself that he didn’t want to kiss him; it didn’t work.

In the patterns that he’d once traced fingerprints on Matty’s back, Matty had traced back upon his mind. George missed himself. He missed his head. He missed the world they’d lived in before everything. They’d missed a world in which they’d had hopes of seeing more than spring.

Moments passed outstretched like days; neither boy quite dared to figure them out - to condemn themselves to the time, or to the moment.

George was grateful. If nothing else. Grateful in words he could never express, because despite every word, despite every promise; Matty had come back, Matty had come back for him. It had him sick to his stomach, but of course, there was nothing he could do. He perhaps just wished he could understand, but if you wanted the world, truth was that you should never ask for it.

“Why?” The silence ebbed out around them; George grew braver and bolder still. Matty still snuck glances, as if he couldn’t quite convince himself that the boy beside him, sprawled out on the bedroom floor, was entirely tangible at all.

To his credit, George didn’t feel all that tangible either. Drifting was an odd concept: entangled with a wretched kind of half living. George didn’t know what he wanted anymore, other than to feel alive.

“Why what?” Matty bit back into the cold summer air, into the bubble forming around the two of them, into the misty air. The silence had seemed eternal, like some great foe they’d never quite vanquish, but it seemed that Matty wasn’t scared.

“Why did you come back?” George spoke slowly, perhaps excessively so. But if Matty did mind, he didn’t mention it. And that was that. And that was them. 

“Because…” Matty gave it enough due as if it served to form an answer itself.

George didn’t push him further; he reckoned he’d done enough of that as it was.

Still, the ‘I love you’ hung faint and valiant in the air. What had once been traced over the boys like kisses on thighs. George wanted to fall in love with him: one last time.

“Because you’d… you’d leave otherwise. You’d take it as a reason to go. You’re not gone right now because we’re here on your bedroom floor and we’re talking. I’m here so you’re here. I want you to stay.” His voice cracked a little; George tried not to let recognition show upon his face. He was clueless as to what he wanted to achieve; he just wanted things to feel real again.

“If you wanted me to stay…” George drew out a sigh: dreaming of a world in which they didn’t have to have such a conversation. “You’re going to have to sit here forever.”

Matty folded his arms across his chest. Took a breath. And unfolded them again.

George watched, for what felt like forever. It was forever, up in his head at least.

“Maybe I will.” He uttered: defiant. George didn’t believe him, but Matty didn’t want him to. This wasn’t about that.

The air grew colder still and Matty closed his eyes. George dared to ask himself questions - when questions and how questions. The truth of it all was perhaps that he was going to  _ have _ to leave. And he was going to  _ have _ to leave soon. And there was going to be one final word, and one final kiss, and one final moment of  _ them _ .

As much as George wanted that: to be free from everything, to breathe fully in his chest again, he could never quite bring himself to do it. Somedays felt like all he’d done was lie to himself, because the truth was that he didn’t want to leave Matty at all; he simply knew it was best for the both of them.

Matty breathed. George closed his eyes. Slowly.

He pictured a world in which he’d stay. George couldn’t dare to imagine what would become of them then.

“Don’t sit here forever.” He told him, voice shaking.

Matty smiled; it was a nice thought, really. He reached for George’s hand, and for the moments that followed, together, that was how they lived.

And as silence sort to set its spell upon the two desperately lost boys, Matty’s head began to work: to twist and turn in all manner of ways. For a good minute, he couldn’t quite breathe. For the one that followed, he wondered if it was possible to suffocate on oxygen.

“I had this dream about you leaving.” He told him, far too simply. “We were on a train station. Like in the city. It was all nice, and built up, and the kind of place that we never should have fit. You had this suitcase, full of your shit. I never really guessed what you could fit inside that. I don’t think you even have so many things. But, in my dream you had the world, and a scarf. You had a  _ scarf _ .”

George snorted, interrupting Matty’s story. The younger boy arched an eyebrow and continued.

“You had a scarf, yeah. And I think it was autumn because we both had coats. But we were stood on this busy platform of this train station. And you were about to leave, to catch this train, and you never said to where but it felt like London, and I kept thinking, kept wondering what the fuck you could do in London. And it was like you were reading my thoughts because every time I thought it you just shook your head ‘no’. But you never told me where you were going and you never told me why.”

He paused for a moment, leaving George unsure as to whether it was the end of the story. It was not.

“And then the train arrived. And you stared it down like it was the most magnificent thing in the world. Like it - your way out of here, was everything. And I grabbed your hand, to keep you there for just a minute. But you had to go. You never told me, but I knew. And then I kissed you. I didn’t think about it. But I did, I kissed you, in the middle of the crowds, in the middle of the platform… and…” 

Matty drew out a breath.

“And then they didn’t let you on the train for being queer, and it was… my fault, you said, and you screamed at me and yelled. And I told you there’d be another train to catch, but-... You didn’t listen and you… you… threw yourself onto the tracks.”

George remained awfully silent and awfully still.

“That’s not going to happen.” He told Matty, like a promise, still, Matty couldn’t quite believe him.

“I promise you.” He tried again. But still, words bore no meaning in the cold, stale, June air.

George tried again, this time with his lips. For that was a promise Matty could believe in. And as the world closed in around them, George trailed his fingers up Matty’s back.

The two boys, they stepped into the tide.

“No train tracks.” George told him, hand against his thigh.

-

“I love you.” Matty whispered up into his neck, tracing his spine with his fingertips. George shivered into his touch, like the last shake an animal gave before it died.

As his eyelids lulled closed, George took the beautiful boy into his arms and into bed. He watched him fall asleep. This was the last time, for once, it felt right, like the gentle waves of the ocean - the calm, the peace to it all.

“Goodbye.” George uttered to the sleeping boy, at rest, under ocean waves: drifting down to the sea shore. But George couldn’t dive after him - not anymore.

That was it. That was them. Before came the storm, and they died ought there, in the wrath of choppy waves against the rocks. And in that moment, as Matty’s fingers still brushed warm against George’s they were alive, they were in love, forever.

-


	8. "but there we were."

**AN EPILOGUE, OF SORTS.**

_ ‘Dear Matty. _

_ I make a lot of bad decisions. You were not one of them. Loving you. That, though, just might have been. But there’s nothing I can do about that now. Nothing I can do about us now. _

_ I hope you’re happy. And I don’t mean plastic smile at the neighbours happy. I mean screaming at the night sky, high on life happy. I hope you know what that happy means. I’m not sure I do. _

_ I don’t like the city. I wouldn’t say I hate it. But I wouldn’t say I’m happy here. But I wouldn’t have said I was happy back there either. I think it’s just weird. A house without cracks in the walls. A home. Conversations. We’re speaking, you know? _

_ Me and my mum - we’re speaking now. I mean. She had to have said something. I guess it takes a lot to stay entirely silent when your son turns up out of the blue after two years. But there always was this part of me that thought she wouldn’t even let me in. I don’t know what I’d do then. I think maybe I would have used it as an excuse to come back. And we could have pretended to live like we were in love forever. Wouldn’t you have liked that? _

_ She didn’t say anything properly for a long time. Just my name. George. George. George. All over and over again. Like she’d forgotten it. Like it had held no place on her tongue for the past two years. And I looked her right in the eye and said: ‘Mum’. Then she started crying. It’s kind of odd to see your mother cry. _

_ Even more odd when you didn’t consider her your mother very much at all. I mean, what are you supposed to do? Like, you’re the one supposed to be crying, supposed to be comforted. But I’m eighteen. I’m an adult now. And this is that. I think. Being an adult. Taking responsibilities. Does it make me sound like an adult if I tell you you’ll understand when you’re older? Ha. You’d punch me if you could. Wouldn’t you? _

_ I think I’d let you. _

_ I made her a cup of tea. In the end, that’s what I did. And I don’t think I made it right because it’s been years since I’ve been home, and fuck if the one thing I remembered was how my mum liked her tea. But I made tea. And we drank it together, and she said my name like it was something she had to get off her chest. I let her. _

_ I wondered, I think if we’d ever move on from that. If there’d ever be more than ‘George’ and ‘Mum’, and stolen glances, and cooling cups of tea. I wondered what would become of us. Of that. You see. I always had this idea in my head that I’d be coming back, and I’d cry on your shoulder with this great fucked up story of how everything went wrong, but I’d be glad to be back. And I’d kiss you. For like three hours straight. And maybe I’d go back to drugs. But then at least I could have said that I’d tried. And we wouldn’t talk about it - not home, not family, not Jesse, not anyone. We’d brush over all the mistakes I’d made. And I know you’d let me. _

_ I think that’s why it can’t be like that. Like up in our heads. Where we’re in love and it’s not pretend. And you can lie to me just as well as I can to you. _

_ But then my dad came home from work and then there had to be conversation. My mum was still crying over a cup of tea in the kitchen, and I was just sort of trapped in this limbo between the two of them as I stood in the doorway. And my dad, I couldn’t tell if he was looking at me or looking through me. _

_ I almost felt like I wasn’t there at all. I think he looked at me like I couldn’t be - because at first, he didn’t believe it himself. And maybe for like ten minutes there, I was a ghost. _

_ And then he said my name. George. Over and over again. Like mum had. But his voice was different. He didn’t cry. He just looked. Like he was waiting for mum to stop crying. So we could all sit down and have a nice civilised conversation. But that didn’t happen. Because it all got to me. All the looks and the stares, and the expectations and the everything wrapped up around us. I don’t really remember doing it but I dropped my mug. Onto the floor. Onto my feet. _

_ And everyone just sort of looked at me. _

_ I mean, I couldn’t blame them. I just sorted of looked at me too. Well, at my feet. At the hot tea pooling out onto the kitchen floor, and my bare feet in the middle of it. And then, the shattered pieces of ceramic. I wondered if it had been somebody’s favourite mug. But I didn’t know. I guess my parents are the kind of people to have a favourite mug. But somehow I guessed that wasn’t why my mum started screaming. _

_ It probably had something to do with the piece of broken ceramic that had slotted itself into my foot. It cut the skin open almost perfectly. I didn’t feel it at first, you know? I think I only started crying when my mum started screaming. But for a while, I just stared at the blood, pooling around my feet. I thought it looked a lot worse than it actually was, but I didn’t really know. _

_ I guess we were forced to talk to each other when we were piled into my dad’s car, swerving past cars at unreasonable speeds on the way to the hospital. I think that was when I started being real to them. Like all the parenting instincts kicked in when I cut up my foot. _

_ I thought it should have hurt more than it did. But I just let everything happen around me. Let my parents have their conversation over me. It was almost like I was fourteen again. I didn’t know if that was a good thing or not. I guess I still don’t know now. _

_ But like, I didn’t die or anything. No permanent damage. I got stitches. And the nurse in the hospital was kind of cute. I mean, she was at least twenty five. But she smiled in a way I sorted of needed. With people crying around me. And they gave me drugs for the pain, so getting legally high in front of my parents, that was an experience. But they weren’t really the fun drugs. I just went to sleep. _

_ And I had these crazy dreams where my parents cared about me again. Then crazier still, I think they weren’t dreams at all. _

_ Because I woke up in the hospital, and my sister was there. I’d sort of tucked her away in the family part of my head, trying to forget she’d ever existed, because I needed to deal, you know, with everything. But then, she was there, and she was real. Which is maybe a weird thing to say, because of course she was, but, it sort of stood out to me. Because she was real, and alive. And I’d sort of let her die in my mind. I think that makes me a bad brother, but what can I do? _

_ I don’t know if I ever told you that I had a sister. Well, I have two. The other’s in like, fucking America, I think. So maybe it’d be a bit drastic to call her over because I’d been a dickhead and dropped a mug of boiling tea onto my foot and nearly broken it or something. _

_ But my sister that came. Her name’s Sarah. She’s like twenty, or twenty one, or maybe twenty two. I should know. But I don’t. I just know that she smiled at me and brought me cake. That was nice. That was really nice of her. And she shooed our parents out of the room, thank god, and sat on the bed with me.  _

_ We ate too much cake and had a chat. It was the sort of calm, casual thing that just felt so out of place. I felt like I was about ten years old. Like we were just kids again. She didn’t talk about my foot, or my sexuality, or the fact that I’d decided to show up again after two years, or where I’d been. But that was okay. I was still working on answers to those questions. _

_ We went home around lunchtime. And I’ve never been a fan of hospitals. I don’t think anyone is, but I didn’t want to leave. Because we’d get home. And then everything would start up again. But things always had to happen. I knew that. _

_ So we got home and sat around the dinner table as mum tried to put some lunch together quickly. My dad stared at me. I stared at my sister. She saw what I was doing, and stared at him. _

_ We had pasta. I don’t think I really enjoyed it, but I ate it anyway. Then, I think I had to. And finally, my mum looked me in the eyes and asked me, in these words - “Where the hell have you been?” _

_ I laughed. Because it was funny. My mum saying ‘hell’. Like that. She’d always been very polite and very conservative, but there we were. Nobody else really found it funny. _

_ I told her I’d been about. All over the place, with friends. With people that would talk to me regardless of my sexuality. And then she stared at my dad. And my sister stared at me. _

_ And she drew in a breath, like she really needed the air. And looked me right in the eyes and said - “I’m talking to you now, aren’t I?”. I looked at my dad and he nodded. I looked at my sister and she smiled, although she didn’t need to. That was different. _

_ Then we just ate lunch and I thought about a million different ways to say the word ‘bisexual’, until we’d all finished eating and I couldn’t hide behind that anymore. I didn’t look anybody in the eyes that time. I just said “I like boys like I like girls.” And somebody said “we know.” I can’t remember who. Because that was when I started crying. _

_ I kind of lost what took me from the dinner table to my old bedroom. Or my bedroom again. Because I was sat on the cramped single bed, and the door creaked open and my sister sat down with me, with the cake, or the third that was left of it. And I laughed. _

_ And I think then. Things were okay again. _

_ They never asked me why I wanted to stay. I just told them I did. That I wanted things to work out. Things to make sense. And I think, slowly, over the months. They did. _

_ I’ve got a proper job now. Imagine that. George Daniel - respectable citizen. But here we are. Here I am. But I can’t stop thinking about things sometimes. I can’t stop thinking about you, I can’t-’ _

George rubbed his eyes. Ink blotted and smudged across the page. He crossed a neat single line through his last few sentences.

_ ‘Sorry about everything. I hope you’re doing good. I hope you do well in school. I hope you get yourself someone who loves you, properly. Not someone who needs an excuse to stay in a shitty old town. I hope you get somewhere in life, you know? I hope you get out to the city, maybe you’ll like it better than me. _

_ I love you. Goodbye. _

_ George.’ _

George stared down at the letter: the scrawled mess of black ink, the stories extended out into words that he hoped Matty might come to comprehend. This wasn’t an explanation, this was an excuse.

He took the letter into his hand and clenched his fist. The scrunched up ball of paper seemed to hold little weight at all as he stuffed it into his top drawer - left to rest amongst a dozen others.

Amongst those months, George had thought out a good dozen ways to say ‘I’m sorry’, but not a single way to be brave enough to voice them aloud, or in print, to seal them into addressed envelopes, ready to be sent.

He toyed with the word ‘happy’ in his head. The night grew old and George grew bored. He switched off the light and thought of Cam, then of Matty, and then of Jesse. His heart grow old and he went to bed, as the night almost seemed to smile at him through the window. George smiled back.

He only hoped, miles away, wherever he was, whatever he was doing, that somehow Matty could feel that smile.

-

It hurt.

In more ways than one.

Matty watched the skies turn grey and pulled at his lip until it bled.

It was a dreary afternoon. A dreadful day, and one he saw only out of courtesy. There was a world, maybe even several universes, in which he was curled up in bed that afternoon. He would have perhaps given his soul for a lazy day in bed, but it seemed as if his soul was not his to give anymore.

Ross looked at him in a very Ross-like way; what else was Matty to expect? He reckoned it was on account of the way his lip was bleeding, but still, Matty didn’t stop. He tugged and pulled at the skin like his life depended on it, and still, Ross stared, as if to carve a hole out of his insides.

Someone, somewhere, amidst the crowds, uttered a comment about how they thought it was going to rain. Matty grinned - all whimsical and fiendish, and stared up at the skies, but then the clouds moved on, as if just to tease him, and Matty found himself staring up at an awful lot of grey nothingness.

Adam wasn’t there yet. It bothered Ross more than it did Matty - as most things did. But still, Matty bade it as yet one more reason to give his lip grief, although it was certainly much more of a nervous habit than a conscious thing, and Ross was yet to ask him to stop, so things didn’t at least, appear in dire straits.

Matty didn’t like Adam’s girlfriend’s friends. And yet they surrounded him. And yet he let them; he let them think he was cute; he let them think he was straight. Ross glared at him - it seemed phrased as some sort of warning, although Matty reckoned it was much more to do with the fact that he was jealous.

Rain. Matty repeated to himself, expectantly. When would it rain? He wanted freedom, he wanted an excuse to go inside, to find a boy to smile at, to dare to court with his eyes. But no, they were waiting for Adam. And Adam’s girlfriend - it seemed.

Although Matty wasn’t one to admit it, he wasn’t entirely confident he could pick out Adam’s girlfriend amidst a line up of vaguely pretty, dark-haired girls. They’d been dating for six months; Matty was an abysmal friend.

Someone was turning seventeen. Matty wasn’t entirely sure who; he wasn’t good with birthdays - he’d never been. He was instead growing tired of girls who stared at you like you were some type of god the moment you lit up a cigarette.

Time dwindled. And Adam arrived. And Ross set out to do some serious glaring. And Matty laughed and laughed until the world around him disappeared; the girls were nice, but this was a party, and certainly had set out to treat it like one.

Drink. A word repeated like a prayer, like a mantra, like an oath, like a promise. Drink. Muffled cries, mumbled words to direct his feet through the hall, through the bright lights, through smiles and pretty dresses, through the kind of mess one of those girls had organised.

There was cake, though. That certainly brightened up Matty’s day. There was booze and there was cake, and Matty had never claimed to be a good man, so he grabbed a bottle of red and a slice of Victoria sponge and headed off into the backrooms. He traced the words ‘No Entry’ with his fingertips, a smirk quirking over his lips, in truth, all he owed himself was the honour of discovery.

Part of him had expected to find some sort of eighth world wonder or some desperately hidden secret tucked away behind the backdoor, but had instead stumbled upon little more than the disabled toilet and an empty meeting room. He filed the location of the disabled toilet away for future knowledge and set out to fiddle with the bolt lock on the meeting room door. 

It seemed stupid, really - to lock it from the outside - it sorted of implied that there was something to be kept in, and not the world to be kept out.

Matty saw why soon enough. This was the part of the town hall that lay obscured from view: hidden by countless layers of shrubbery and shrouded in rumour and delight. Again, Matty had expected magic, or indeed wonder, and couldn’t contain his disappointment at derelict abandonment.

Still, he made his way across the wooden floor, scraping layers of dust from neatly arranged chairs as he laid his gaze upon broken windows, and tall shadows cast across the floor by the last few glimpses of sunlight. He caught the breeze, and stood still, stood alive, and breathed.

With his head a little more in check, and the sounds of the party and the rest of the world long drowned out behind him, Matty placed the wine and the cake out neatly upon the table, dragging out a chair and sitting himself down to inspect his surroundings.

He rolled himself a joint, and let his fingers fumble around in his pocket, brushing over familiar words, over words left forgotten. He glanced the cracks in the walls; there’d been a house like this once. In another world, in another universe, a boy would have sat beside him.

As Matty’s body froze over, he wondered if he should have stayed out there with the girls; if he should have forced himself to make polite, heterosexual conversation, as he resisted the urge to run off with their boyfriends.

Being gay in 1986 was sort of, troubling. In fact, the more Matty came to learn about himself, the more he cause he had to worry, to chase thoughts out of his own head. That afternoon, however, such a notion was not his concern. Instead, he finished his slice of cake, and threw his feet up onto the table, and watched the way his skinny, little legs seemed to waver in the breeze.

Yet as the moments ticked by, Matty’s world was forever drawn back into his pocket, into the world contained in it, into the world he’d left behind, the world that had once belonged to two. He lit himself a cigarette - just to pass the time, to put work to his fingers, to busy his mind.

He took a couple of drags before he grew tired with the prospect, and pressed the cigarette down into the wood of the table: seeking to burn a hole into it. The blackened mark he left almost made him smile. It was needless to say, Matty didn’t work at the bookstore anymore.

It was then, as he sat in the room with broken windows that the skies opened up and finally began to rain. That said things about Matty’s life that he didn’t care to contemplate. Instead, he traced his head back through the months, back through his every breath, until his fingers grew cold and relentless as they curled in around the note. Kept in his jacket pocket. After all this time.

Except it wasn’t really his jacket at all. It was George’s - or at least it had been. But Matty didn’t let his mind wander there anymore.

Except then there was a great clap of thunder and Matty glanced down at his feet. He breathed. In and out. In. And Out. Like he knew nothing else but the steady rise and fall of his chest.

“George.” He’d said it before he could stop himself.

And then it came down with the thundering of raindrops. “George. George. George. George. George.” Over and over again like he’d forgotten how to say it. Like the name had held no place on his tongue, like all they’d once had had simply never once been.

Matty whispered his name until it felt right and downed the bottle of wine.

It wasn’t until he’d finished every last drop that he dared to drag his fingers back into his pocket and retrieve the note that had sat there, for month after month.

He folded it out onto the table, to sit amidst the dust - for George’s words to rot away in the abandoned room. Almost  _ dilapidated _ , it seemed.

Dilapidated to the tune of  _ ‘I love you’  _ scrawled in messy cursive.

Matty shook his head. He’d wished for miracles, for change, for the eighth wonder of the world amidst this mess, somewhere, but instead, he sat between meaningless words and broken windows and sought to make sense of his head.

He locked himself inside the disabled toilet for a good twenty minutes and allowed himself a well deserved little cry. Matty pulled his hair up into a bun, letting loose curls roam free, as he rubbed his face with cold water, and had a quick piss - very much on the basis of might as well. He gave his dick an odd kind of drunken, depressing glance before shoving it back into his pants, then washing his hands for a good six minutes and striding, under a glorious facade of confidence, out of the toilet.

Back in the hall, Matty spotted Ross instantly - he was,  _ very _ , very drunk. The kind of drunk that made Matty smile in a way he hadn’t for a long time. He considered striking up conversation but instead kept to the walls as he tried to avoid catching anyone’s eye.

He could go for another bottle of wine - that seemed like a very viable option, on the basis that this was definitely not the kind of party where he could get anything stronger.

It was then, however, as he concluded that this party had nothing left to give him, a girl - a little different from the others - placed herself between him and the drinks table. She gave him an over confident smile; one that Matty took as a challenge.

With a million words drifting aimlessly around his mind, Matty was instead simply left to watch in silence as she retrieved a little bag of pills from her coat pocket. She grinned at him. With her eyes. Golden in the light.

And with fingers curled around his wrist she uttered, “Come on. Outside,” as if there was no element of uncertainty to it.

Matty wondered if he was supposed to know her, but her face was unplaceable, as she dragged him out onto the back wall outside and lit up a cigarette. She then flashed that same smile and Matty felt heavy under the weight of questions in his head.

The air was cold. She puffed breaths broken like promises. He cast shadows that grew taller than he could ever try to be.

They didn’t speak a word, but still they smiled. Matty let her curl his fingers around a cigarette; she seemed to know what to do with him despite their lack of acquaintance. He racked his brains, continuously, wondering if perhaps, under some long forgotten circumstance, they had, in fact, met.

Curiosity got the better of him in the end. It seemed, as if it always did.

With a narrow, hesitant stare, Matty chanced the sparking of a conversation - it was either flames or ashes, and either way it seemed as if he might get burned. “Have we met before?”

She smiled at him, all perfectly straight, white teeth: a gesture too perfectly orchestrated for Matty to decode.

“No. I’m Dalia.” She carried a tone of elegance, status, even, in her voice that simply hadn’t been present inside - as if she’d masked it in order not to scare him off. “And you’re  _ Matthew _ .” No one had said his name like that in a long time.

“It’s Matty.” He corrected: short and curt.

“I know.” She passed him a smile, watching the way cigarette smoke carried on the breeze. “I was hoping to find you here.”

“Why?” Matty contemplated her, in all of her wavering, small town glory.

“I wanted to see how you’re doing.” She spoke as if she was an old friend, and yet as if she knew Matty wondered if she was more than a stranger, but seemed to only regard that information with the task of teasing him. 

“I”m doing fine.” Matty told her, not very truthfully. “ _ Why _ ? How do you know me?”

“I know  _ everyone _ .” She asserted it like a fact, with confidence, as if it was even obvious.

“Small town?” Matty sought to fill in the gaps in his own head.

“Yeah.” She watched him part the sea and the rode the path he’d made for her. “We all know everyone, really.”

“Do you know then?” Matty managed a grin. “Whose birthday party this is?” He gestured vaguely back to the hall.

Dalia watched him. All wide eyes. Careful smiles. Yet somehow like he’d still managed to surprise her.

“You don’t?” The notion seemed to amuse her, in very much the same way that it would irritate Ross. “Emily’s.”

“Who’s  _ Emily _ ?” Matty stared at her, lost up in a cloud of smoke.

“Fucking hell…  _ ‘who’s Emily?’ _ ...” She shook her head in disbelief. “I thought you came for more than the free booze?”

Matty wasn’t at all sure as to how she’d managed to draw such a conclusion but shrugged it off regardless. “Cake too. And because my friends wanted me to.”

“Ah.” She gave a sigh, shaking her head - at what, Matty couldn’t quite explain.

“I’m not alright, really.” Matty wasn’t entirely sure why he’d said it; the words had left his lips without permission. “I’m just sort of…  _ floating _ . And sometimes you get so fucking bored with floating you  _ want _ to make yourself sink, but-”

Matty stopped and looked Dalia in the eye. He smiled. 

“Death.” She produced the word with vigour, in all flying colours, as if it didn’t scare her at all. “ _ Death _ .” She repeated it, perhaps just to memorise the way it sounded aloud.

Matty looked on impatiently, expectant of more, of the great conclusion to everything, for that great turbulent moment when everything finally started to make sense. Instead, however, she reached into her jacket pocket and produced a little bag of pills.

The conversation that followed was all in looks and glances. She waited until a pill was on Matty’s tongue before continuing; she wasn’t waiting long.

“They say, you know, that death is the brother of fate.” She swallowed. Matty stared at her throat, at fingerprint shaped bruises upon it; he didn’t ask and she didn’t tell, but in another life he would have killed the one that put them there, in another that one might have been himself.

“And love, she’s the mother of everything.” Dalia filled the silence she’d created, as if she truly cared not what Matty thought of her. And for a moment, she seemed to glisten in the sunlight, as if she wasn’t even real.

“Who are  _ ‘they’ _ ?” Matty quirked an eyebrow: skeptical.

“Now that’s… that’s a very good question.” She kicked at the grass with her feet, in a playful manner that seemed so very out of place in their conversation.

Matty snorted, chancing a glance up to the skies. “So who’s the dad then? In this ‘family tree’.” He stressed the mocking emphasis to his words; Dalia didn’t appreciate it, but she wasn’t one to comment upon it. “Who falls in love with  _ Love _ ?”

“Hate.” She told it like it was simple. “Because love can make the whole world fall for her, but she’s cursed to chose the only one who could never love her back.”

Matty dug his teeth into his bottom lip. It hurt. It hurt. It hurt. It  _ hurt _ .

“So,” She was quick to change her tune, “Love, goes off and has an affair with Kindness. But it’s like… two magnets, you need opposites. Love doesn’t love Kindness, not really.”

“So Kindness? Does he love her back?” Matty wondered if it was the drugs or just her way with words.

“ _ Yes _ .” Dalia gave way to a sigh. “ _ She  _ does. And it kills her in the end.”

Matty raised his eyebrows, but didn’t say anything. “Who told you this story?”

“My brother.” Dalia smiled. “He’s around here somewhere - looking for someone. This guy owes him something.”

Matty finished his cigarette, stubbing it out into the pavement. “You wanna go back inside? I need another drink.”

She shook her head. “I’m done, I’m going when my brother’s finished.”

Matty watched for a moment: extended and yet so very brief. “I’m gonna go back inside. Nice to meet you - maybe I’ll see you around.” He cracked a smile; she seemed more interesting than Adam’s girlfriend at least.

Dalia cracked a smile, knowing look in her eyes. “We’ll see.”

-

_ ‘Dear Matty, _

_ I don’t love you anymore. That’s not the nicest way to start a letter, but I spent a lot of time lying to you and I don’t want to spend anymore. So I don’t love you. I don’t love you. As much as it looks wrong all written out. I don’t. I just love the idea of you. _

_ Would it make sense for me to ask not to let that hurt you? I mean, cry if you want to. Punch the wall if you want to. But… don’t be sad for the sake of being sad. Because you feel like you should be. _

_ I think we were always kind of like the weeds growing in the cracks of the pavement of life. Where a dandelion can look like a rose. I don’t care if that doesn’t make any sense - it doesn’t have to. _

_ I met this girl, you see. I think we’re going to be happy. Her name’s Lily, and I don’t love you anymore. And I want you to know that. _

_ I don’t know why. I don’t want to hurt you. _

_ But she’s beautiful, and I think we’re in love the way they are in movies. She laughs at my jokes, for a start. And she’s a proper nice girl, and I’m not going to ruin her - not like I ruined you. I’m sorry. I’d like to say you would have liked her. But I don’t know. I don’t know what I made you into. _

_ But we’re living this proper life, you see. With proper jobs and proper good, honest lives. And warm houses and the word ‘love’ out loud. I’m sorry. I think. I hope you’d understand. _

_ I think maybe now I feel like I might make it past twenty. I think that’s more important than chasing the moment with a beautiful boy in a shitty town. But still, I told you once in a letter that I didn’t send, you’re not my mistake, and you never will be. _

_ Maybe there’s a world in which it’s 1985 forever and we don’t ever fall out of love. That’d be nice. Disastrous. But nice. I miss you. I don’t let myself believe it but I do. I hope you’re happy. I hope you fall in love again, but this time for real. Because I think we lived like you were going to be sixteen forever. And such a thing, that’s just not possible. _

_ But she is. We are. I don’t know why I’m telling you. I don’t want to hurt you, I promise. But I want you to know. I think maybe I need you to. _

_ Maybe if you know, you’ll finally come off my mind.’ _

But the letter was in the palm of George’s hand before he could finish it. He stared out at the city lights and allowed himself a moment - just one, just the one - to miss the way it had been.

He yearned sometimes, to make those mistakes all over again. And it was these late nights that he allowed himself to wonder - to entertain the possibility of what might happen if he just ever went back there. And what kind of world he might see.

-

Matty found more than just a drink inside. Matty found more to do in the disabled loo than wipe his tears. He found colours in darkness. He found silence in a crowded room. He found light burning on forever. He found confessions in languages he couldn’t understand.

His name was Nathan, he was tall, dark, and somewhat out of place in the room. But he laughed and he laughed and he laughed, and had the weary weight of Ross’ gaze pinned upon the both of them as they danced. And if Matty ever did anything, it was to highlight his friends’ disapproval.

He held Matty close. And amidst the mess of moving bodies they didn’t feel so wrong. For in another life, they’d been okay, and they’d been in love. For in another life, Matty had lived in a world where it had been okay to kiss boys on the lips. For in another life, promises were kept, and lights never went out.

“Matty.” His voice was low, like a hum against his throat.

Matty let him put his mouth there. Let him move him like he was little more than words on a page. Matty let him tear him apart and put him back together again in the way he saw fit. Maybe it was the drugs. Or maybe in that world, in that moment, under those lights, they could pretend to be in love.

Matty closed his eyes and let himself be held for a little while.

He opened them again as sound flooded back into his ears and the grip around his wrists felt apart around him. It was in that moment that the world crept back up upon him, and the crowd seemed to move more as people than one great beast.

He stared through the lights and watched people move, people go throughout their lives: falling in and out of love, over and over again. Yet, one person amidst the crowds seemed to shimmer in the night.

He rubbed his eyes: swearing they had to be deceiving him, for just for a moment, amidst the crowds, Matty thought he saw an awfully familiar face. 

Familiar to the tune of cracks on the wall, and forest walks, and shared cigarettes, and the river that had once seemed like an ocean. Familiar to the tune of falling apart - familiar to the tune of an ‘I love you’ followed by a ‘goodbye’.

Matty caught his breath, as if it might have eluded him otherwise.

Yet common sense was soon to creep in: it was the drugs - it had to be. For, it had always just been the drugs. Or the drink, or the mess, or the guilt, or the grief, or the way his lip had definitely split open and began to trail blood down his chin.

Heart hammering in his chest, Matty turned to search for the familiar dark figure beside him, yet somehow, he was absent too.

That was the thing. He’d loved too much. It was his downfall, but still, there was no choice in love, for it grew like ivy - wherever it wanted to be. For if he’d ever once loved too much, he always would.

Yet love and curiosity were bade to forever stand hand in hand. Matty watched the sea from the shoreline, and between his toes, felt hundreds of tiny grains of sand. 

And for just a moment, but it only took one. He dared to look back. To chase a figure down through the crowd. For  curiosity got the better of him in the end. It seemed, as if it always did.

And perhaps lost up in the millions of universes out there, was a world in which the face he caught through the crowd was the one he really wanted to see.

-

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> there we go, hope you enjoyed this story. comments would be lovely but if u dont want to leave one thats fine.
> 
> u can find me on twitter at geogredaniel, or tumblr at sunshineisak, or various other social medias listed on my profile if you happen to care that much


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